Australia’s highest court has ruled in favor of dismissing child sex abuse convictions for Cardinal George Pell.
Chief Justice Susan Kiefel announced the decision made by the seven judges recently made in the appeal of the Cardinal. This means he will be freed from Barwon Prison after serving 13 months of his initial 6-year sentence.
Cardinal Pell was convicted back in 2018 for the sexual abuse of two 13-year-old choirboys in a room at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne in December 1996 while he was still an archbishop.
The Cardinal also received charges for the indecent assault of one of the boys by squeezing his genitals in a hurtful way after a 1997 Mass.
Pell was initially ordered to serve 3 years and 8 months in prison before becoming eligible for parole.
The High Court found that the Victorian Court of Appeal was not correct in its 2-1 majority ruling back in August to uphold the verdicts of the jury.
The Cardinal was the Vatican’s third most highly-ranked servant as he went back to Melbourne in July of 2017 in order to clear his name of a number of child abuse allegations.
Over the years, all charges were dropped on Pell except the two allegations he was imprisoned for.
The Cardinal was tried on the charges two times back in 2018, with the first trial ending in a jury deadlock.
Pell gave testimony neither at the trials nor at the later appeals. However, the juries watched his empathic self-defense in a police interview filmed in an airport hotel conference room in 2016.
“The allegations involve vile and disgusting conduct contrary to everything I hold dear and contrary to the explicit teachings of the church which I have spent my life representing,” the Cardinal read from a prepared paper.
In addition, he noted that he had set up a world-first compensation scheme for victims of clergy abuse, the Melbourne Response, a number of months before the alleged crimes took place.
When questioned by police, Pell said:
“Absolutely disgraceful rubbish. It’s completely false. Madness.”
The Cardinal’s conviction formed in large part due to the testimony of one of the choirboys, who is now in his 30s and has a family.
He went to the police in 2015 after the second boy died of a heroin overdose at 31 years of age. The law states that neither of the boys is to be identified.
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Source: Daily Mail
