Australian highest court to rule on Cardinal’s appeal later
Court Watch
Australia’s highest court on Thursday said it will deliver a verdict at a later date on whether to overturn the convictions of the most senior Catholic to be found guilty of child sex abuse.
Cardinal George Pell’s lawyer, Bret Walker, told the High Court that if it found a lower court had made a mistake in upholding Pell’s convictions, he should be acquitted.
Prosecutor Kerri Judd told the seven judges that if there were a mistake, they should send the case back to the Victoria state Court of Appeal to hear it again.
Otherwise, the High Court should hear more evidence and decide itself whether the convictions against Pope Francis’ former finance minister should stand, Judd said.
Pell is one year into a six-year sentence after being convicted of molesting two 13-year-old choirboys in Melbourne’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral while he was the city’s archbishop in the late 1990s.
The 78-year-old cleric’s two-day hearing that ended on Thursday could be his last chance of clearing his name.
Pell was largely convicted on the testimony of one of the choirboys, now in his 30s with a young family.
He first went to police in 2015 after the second victim died of a heroin overdose at the age of 31. Neither can be identified under state law.
Judd told the court on Thursday that the surviving victim’s detailed knowledge of the layout of the priests’ sacristy supported his accusation that the boys were molested there.
Related listings
-
Supreme Court will decide fate of Obama health care law
Court Watch 03/01/2020The Supreme Court agreed Monday to decide a lawsuit that threatens the Obama-era health care law, but the decision is not likely until after the 2020 election.The court said it would hear an appeal by 20 mainly Democratic states of a lower-court ruli...
-
Justices return for season of big decisions, amid campaign
Court Watch 02/19/2020For a Supreme Court that says it has an allergy to politics, the next few months might require a lot of tissues.The court is poised to issue campaign-season decisions in the full bloom of spring in cases dealing with President Donald Trump’s ta...
-
Missouri county sued over jail time for unpaid court costs
Court Watch 02/07/2020A Missouri man at the heart of a state Supreme Court case that overturned what critics called modern-day debtors’ prisons is back in jail and suing the local officials who put him there. Warrensburg resident George Richey, 65, is one of two Mis...