Cardinal George Pell leaves the County Court in Melbourne, Australia on Feb. 26, 2019. Australia’s highest court dismissed the convictions of the most senior Catholic found guilty of child sex abuse.Australia’s highest court has dismissed the convictions of the most senior Catholic found guilty of child sex abuse.
Pell had been ordered to serve three years and eight months behind bars before he became eligible for parole. All the charges were dropped by prosecutors or dismissed by courts in preliminary hearings over the years except the cathedral allegations.Pell did not testify at either trial or at the subsequent appeals.But the juries saw his emphatic denials in a police interview that was video recorded in a Rome airport hotel conference room in October 2016.
As police detailed the abuse allegations, Pell responded: “Absolutely disgraceful rubbish. It’s completely false. Madness.” Pell’s lawyers argued that Pell would have been standing on the cathedral steps chatting with churchgoers after Mass when his crimes were alleged to have occurred, was always with other clerics when dressed in his archbishop’s robes, could not have performed the sexual acts alleged while wearing the cumbersome garments and could not have abused the boys in the busy priests’ sacristy without being detected.
How? I thought all trials were stayed because of this pandemic.
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