Page:Pell v The Queen.pdf/7

 1 KIEFEL CJ, BELL, GAGELER, KEANE, NETTLE, GORDON AND EDELMAN JJ. On 11 December 2018, the applicant was convicted following a trial before the County Court of Victoria (Chief Judge Kidd and a jury) of one charge of sexual penetration of a child under 16 years and four charges of committing an act of indecency with or in the presence of a child under the age of 16 years. The offences charged in the first four charges were alleged to have been committed on a date between 1 July and 31 December 1996. The fifth charge was alleged to have been committed between 1 July 1996 and 28 February 1997. All the offences were alleged to have been committed in St Patrick's Cathedral, East Melbourne ("the Cathedral"), following the celebration of Sunday solemn Mass and within months of the applicant's installation as Archbishop of Melbourne. The victims of the alleged offending were two Cathedral choirboys, "A" and "B". Procedural history

Procedural history

2 A made his first complaint about the alleged assaults in June 2015. The prosecution case was wholly dependent upon acceptance of the truthfulness and the reliability of A's evidence. By the time A made his complaint, B had died in accidental circumstances. In 2001, B had been asked by his mother whether he had ever been "interfered with or touched up" while in the Cathedral choir. He said that he had not.

3 This was the second trial of these charges, the jury at the first trial having been unable to agree on its verdicts.

4 The applicant sought leave to appeal against his convictions to the Court of Appeal of the Supreme Court of Victoria (Ferguson CJ, Maxwell P and Weinberg JA). He was granted leave on a single ground (ground 1), which contended that the verdicts were unreasonable and could not be supported by the evidence.

5 The members of the Court of Appeal viewed the recording of A's evidence, and that of a number of other prosecution witnesses. The majority, Ferguson CJ and Maxwell P, assessed A as a compellingly credible witness. There was