Jailed Australian Cardinal George Pell yesterday asked appeals court judges to quash his landmark conviction for child sex abuse, branding the charges against him “bizarre” and “impossible.”
Pell, 77, is battling guilty verdicts handed down against him in December last year on five counts of sexually assaulting two choirboys in Melbourne’s St Patrick’s Cathedral in 1996 and 1997.
“The verdicts represent a disturbing failure of our jury system,” Pell’s submission read. “The verdicts should be quashed.”
The Vatican’s former No. 3 — who managed the church’s vast finances and helped elect two popes — was in March sentenced to six years in prison, becoming the most senior Catholic ever jailed for child sex abuse.
Wearing his clerical collar and a black suit, and guarded by police, Pell took notes of the proceedings as his lawyer, Bret Walker, detailed a “catalogue” of elements that he said should have prevented his client’s conviction.
Walker described the five or six minutes of abuse that the 13-year-old boys suffered as a “bizarrely unlikely hotchpotch theory” put forward by the prosecution.
“Evidently, the jury believes the complainant,” Walker said.
He said it was “physically impossible” for Pell to abuse the boys due to the discrepancy in the timing of the assaults, the way his archbishop’s robes were worn and that Pell typically mingled with congregants at the western door of the cathedral after mass, when the abuse is said to have taken place.
“The word is alibi,” Walker said, adding that the entire case against the cardinal amounted to a “bizarre unlikelihood.”
“The law of physics tells us this is literally, logically impossible for the offending to have occurred,” he said.
Central to the defense appeal is that the jury reached an unreasonable verdict based “entirely upon the uncorroborated evidence of the complainant.”
Pell’s second victim died of a drug overdose in 2014 and never officially disclosed the abuse.
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