Breaking Cardinal George Pell will be freed from jail after the High Court overturned his conviction for historic child sex offences
The stunning High Court intervention in Australia’s most contentious case of alleged clergy abuse will reverberate from Canberra to the Vatican and among abuse survivors in Melbourne and Ballarat.
The findings are expected to be highly critical of Pell’s failure, alongside other figures in the church in the 1970s and 80s, to stop the abuse after he learned it was happening.The High Court decision does not repudiate Pell’s accuser, a former choir boy who testified that he and a friend were allegedly indecently assaulted more than 20 years ago by Pell, then Archbishop of Melbourne, at St Patrick’s Cathedral.
This evidence should have caused a jury to have reasonable doubt about Pell’s guilt. It should also have caused the Court of Appeal majority, Chief Justice Anne Ferguson and Court of Appeal President Christ Maxwell, to have misgivings about the jury’s verdict. The former choirboy first told police in 2015 that he and a fellow chorister were indecently assaulted by Pell in 1996 after he caught them drinking altar wine in the priest’s sacristy shortly after Sunday mass.
Separate criminal proceedings against Pell, based on allegations by multiple witnesses that he sexually abused them at a Ballarat swimming pool nearly 50 years ago, were discontinued by the DPP.
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