MELBOURNE (AUSTRALIA)
The New Daily
June 3, 2019
By Lucie Morris-Marr
Cardinal George Pell begins his next major legal fight on Wednesday with the start of an appeal against his conviction over shocking sex attacks on Catholic Church choirboys.
The former treasurer for the Vatican has spent the past 97 days in solitary confinement after being sentenced to six years in prison for violent assaults on two teenage boys at Melbourne’s St Patrick’s Cathedral in the 1990s.
Pell is expected to appear in court for at least the first day of the two-day hearing, giving victims and their supporters their first glimpse at the convicted sex offender since he was taken to a segregation unit of the Melbourne Assessment Prison.
Fighting for him will be one of the country’s leading barristers, whom the Cardinal hired to aid in his bid to have the conviction quashed.
Sydney-based Bret Walker SC will argue Pell’s case in front of three senior judges: Supreme Court Chief Justice Anne Ferguson, Justice Chris Maxwell – the president of the Court of Appeal – and Justice Mark Weinberg.
Bret Walker SC has represented a number of high-profile clients.
There are three main grounds for the appeal.
Firstly, his team will argue the guilty verdicts on the five charges were “unreasonable” and unsafe as it was not open to the jury to be satisfied beyond reasonable doubt on the word on the complainant alone.
During the mistrial and re-trial of the case last year only one of the accusers gave evidence, as the other choirboy passed away of a drug overdose aged 30 in 2014. Neither can be named for legal reasons.
The second ground is the argument that the trial judge, Chief Justice Peter Kidd, made an error by preventing the defence from using a video of the “moving visual representation” of its impossibility argument during the closing address by Pell’s lead barrister Robert Richter QC.
The “pac man” animation, as it was dubbed by court reporters covering the case, represented Pell, the choir, altar servers, assistant priests and staff, as moving dots on the background of a map of the Cathedral.
Finally, the third ground for the appeal is the argument that there was a “fundamental irregularity” in the trial process because the accused was not arraigned in the presence of the jury panel, as required by the Criminal Procedure Act.
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