MELBOURNE (AUSTRALIA)
The New Daily
Dec. 21, 2019
Disgraced cardinal George Pell has spent almost all of 2019 in jail, serving a six-year sentence after being convicted of five sexual offences against two 13-year-old boys.
But Pell’s case – which has divided opinion internationally and taken years to get as far as it has – is still not over.
The convicted paedophile will have a final chance to overturn his conviction in March 2020, after the High Court of Australia agreed in November that it would hear appeal arguments.
He was initially investigated by Victoria Police’s Sano taskforce for “multiple offences” said to have been committed while he was a priest in Ballarat in the 1970s and while he was Archbishop of Melbourne in the 1990s.
In June 2017, after more than 12 months of investigation, Pell, now 78, was charged with multiple counts of historical child sexual offences.
He denied the allegations, describing them as “without foundation and utterly false”, and vowed to clear his name. He also took leave from his role as the Vatican’s financial chief to fight the charges.
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