George Pell sentenced today..

George Pell to be sentenced for sexually abusing two choirboys
By court reporter Emma Younger

Posted2 hours ago, updated23 minutes ago

IMAGEGeorge Pell's sentencing will be broadcast live by media outlets.(Reuters: Mark Dadswell)
Cardinal George Pell will be transported from prison to the Victorian County Court this morning where he will be sentenced for sexually abusing two choirboys when he was Catholic archbishop of Melbourne in the 1990s.

Key points:

• George Pell was found guilty of five charges of chid sex abuse, each carrying a penalty of up to 10 years' jail
• The prosecutor said the offending warranted immediate imprisonment
• Pell is appealing against his conviction on three grounds, including that the jury verdict was unreasonable

The man who was once Australia's most powerful Catholic has spent the past two weeks in custody waiting to be sentenced for one count of sexual penetration of a child under 16 and four counts of committing an indecent act with a child.

Each charge carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in jail.

Pell, 77, was found guilty by a jury last December of sexually abusing the choirboys after a Sunday mass in December 1996 and then assaulting one of them a second time two months later.

The first attack occurred just two months after Pell had announced the Melbourne Response, a scheme to deal with sexual abuse claims against clergy.

The trial had been suppressed to avoid potentially influencing jurors in a planned second trial involving a separate set of charges. But that case was dropped last month, paving the way for the suppression order to be lifted.

Pell will be sentenced by Chief Judge Peter Kidd at 10:00am.

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The Chief Judge gave permission for the hearing to be broadcast live by media outlets.

A County Court spokesman said the court was "committed to the principles of open justice".

Pell's crimes committed at cathedral
The court heard that Pell abused the choirboys, who cannot be identified, after celebrating one of his first Sunday masses as archbishop at St Patrick's Cathedral in East Melbourne.

He caught them drinking altar wine in the priest's sacristy, which was off limits to the choir.

One of the former choirboys gave evidence Pell had planted himself in the doorway and said something like "what are you doing here?" or "you're in trouble".

The then-archbishop moved his robes to expose his penis and forced one of the boys' heads down towards it.

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The trial heard one of the choirboys asked: "Can you let us go? We didn't do anything."

But instead Pell moved onto the other choirboy. He pushed the boy's head down to his crotch and orally raped him.

After a few minutes, Pell ordered the boy to remove his pants and then molested him as he masturbated.

Pell abused that boy a second time two months later, after another Sunday mass when he pushed him up against the wall of a corridor in the back of the cathedral and groped him briefly.

Evidence of the abuse came from that former choirboy alone, who was the victim of two assaults.


IMAGEPell abused the choirboys after celebrating one of his first Sunday masses as archbishop at St Patrick's Cathedral.(ABC News: Danielle Bonica)
Pell's other victim died of a heroin overdose in 2014 and never reported the abuse.

After the suppression order was lifted, Pell's surviving victim said he had experienced shame, loneliness and depression.

which sparked public outrage and moved him to later issue an apology.


IMAGECardinal George Pell's lawyer Robert Richter apologised for describing Pell's crimes as "no more than a plain vanilla sexual penetration case".(AAP: Erik Anderson)
But Chief Judge Kidd said the "forcible, blatant attack on two boys" was a "serious example of this kind of offending".

"I see this as callous, brazen offending … he did have in his mind some sense of impunity," he said.

"He exploited two vulnerable boys and there was an element of force … the way he grabbed the boys' heads, he [continued] in the face of verbal and physical protest.

"There was an element of brutality to this assault, it was an attack."

Pell continues to deny he sexually abused the boys.

He is appealing against his conviction on three grounds including that the jury verdict was unreasonable.

The Court of Appeal will hear the appeal over two days in June.

Pell's prison life
Pell has been held on remand at the Melbourne Assessment Prison, a maximum-security jail which sits on the edge of Melbourne's CBD near Southern Cross Station and a few blocks from the County Court.

Mr Richter told an earlier hearing that Pell would need additional protection even while being held in protective custody.

"He is being portrayed in the media … as the incarnation of evil in the Catholic Church," Mr Richter said.

It is unclear which prison Pell will be transferred to after he is sentenced.

ABC .com.au