Philip Wilson’s sentence for covering up historical child sex abuse ‘inadequate’
PROSECUTORS will argue the penalty handed down to former Adelaide Catholic Archbishop Philip Wilson for covering up child sex abuse is too lenient when they appeal the sentence in court next week.
PROSECUTORS will argue the penalty handed down to former Adelaide Catholic Archbishop Philip Wilson for covering up child sex abuse is too lenient when they appeal the sentence in court next week.
The Director of Public Prosecutions has lodged an “inadequacy appeal” against Wilson’s 12-month jail term, which was to be served on home detention.
He must serve at least six months of the home detention order.
Wilson has lodged his own appeal against his conviction, which will be heard next month.
However, prosecutors will put forward their own case against what they say is an inadequate sentence in the District Court in Newcastle on Wednesday, September 13.
Wilson was found guilty in May of covering up paedophile priest James “Jim” Fletcher’s historic sex abuse against altar boys in the New South Wales Hunter Region in the 1970s and 1980s.
He was found to have withheld information about the offending from police between 2004 and 2006.
Wilson refused to resign as Adelaide’s Archbishop for two months after his conviction but following pressure from child abuse victims, Catholic priests and the then-Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, he resigned in July as a “catalyst to heal pain and distress”.
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