Final appeal over Pell conviction set for March

SYDNEY: The final appeal by Cardinal George Pell against his child sex abuse convictions will be held by Australia’s High Court on March 11-12, the court announced yesterday.

It is the final avenue for the 78-year-old – who is serving a six-year sentence for sexually assaulting two choirboys in a Melbourne cathedral in the 1990s – to get out of jail.

The former Vatican treasurer, who once helped elect popes, was found guilty by a jury in December 2018 of five charges of abusing the choirboys when he was the archbishop of Melbourne. He was sentenced the following March and lost a first appeal in August in Victoria state’s Court of Appeal in a landmark decision that saw the judges split in a 2-1 verdict.

That division – which saw two judges back the jury’s verdict and the dissenting judge side with Pell – is at the forefront of his latest bid to overturn the convictions.

The case pitted the most senior convicted Catholic child molester against a former choirboy now in his 30s, who two of the judges found to be ‘very compelling’ and someone who ‘was clearly not a liar, was not a fantasist and was a witness of truth’.

The third judge, however, found the victim’s account ‘contained discrepancies’ and there was a ‘significant possibility’ Pell did not commit the offences.

Court documents show his legal team are mounting two grounds of appeal, with the key argument being that the majority judges applied an ‘erroneous judicial method’ in ‘upholding with the jury’s verdict’. — AFP