Cardinal Pell: judge decries ‘nasty, venomous, brazen sex offender’

George Pell’s appeal looms large as Chief Judge Peter Kidd savaged the Cardinal during his lengthy sentencing remarks.

Chief Judge Peter Kidd. Picture: AAP

Prison life seems to suit George Pell. For the first time in nearly two years, he walked into court yesterday looking vaguely like a cardinal who had slept.

Perhaps even slept a lot.

Gone were the ridiculously puffy, watery eyes, the telltale evidence of medication doing a job that perhaps his mind or other body parts couldn’t.

Gone also was his clerical collar because prison guards don’t tend to like at-risk inmates wearing anything around their necks.

Instead, prisoner Pell, appearing in criminal case number CR-18-01133, was rocking a black shirt that could have come straight out of Johnny Cash’s wardrobe.

None of this is meant to make light of a terribly serious court case, or indeed a terribly serious predicament for Pell.

It is to show that life goes on, even when things head in weird ­directions.

For nearly two years now, Pell has barely spoken in public, uttering a whisper-quiet “Thank you’’ yesterday when he was signing the sex offenders’ register while sitting in the dock, surrounded by prison guards.

There might also have been a “Beg your pardon’’, but Pell hasn’t spoken substantively in public since the middle of 2017 as police and the courts have circled him ­relentlessly.

While Pell remained respectful of Chief Judge Peter Kidd of the County Court, the same can’t be said of Kidd’s attitude towards Pell. A 53-year-old former Adelaide college boy, Kidd did not miss. Not once.

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Pell, he said, was an arrogant, nasty, venomous, brazen sex offender who had manifestly damaged two young lives.

When he was reading his sentencing remarks to a global TV audience, it was like Kidd was shooting clay targets.

“In my view, your conduct was permeated by staggering arrogance,’’ he told Pell, giving him both barrels.

Pell’s demeanour was different this time. Instead of his attention wandering and his eyes darting at the back of heads throughout the courtroom, he focused his attention on Kidd, blinking regularly and bowing at all the right times.

Yet he must have hated the sentencing remarks because rarely in the history of the Catholic hierarchy worldwide has there been such a demolition of a once-­revered church leader, who the jury found had assaulted two boys, principally in 1996, with another attack on the surviving choirboy in 1997.

Kidd said: “Viewed overall, I consider your moral culpability across both episodes to be high.

“I reject the submission of your counsel that the offending in the first episode or the sexual penetration offence was at or towards the lower end of the spectrum of seriousness.

“In my view, it does not even approach low-end offending.’’

As Kidd spoke, relatives of complainants in the so-called Pell swimming trial, which collapsed because of a lack of evidence, sat, emotional, in the front row of the public seats as the rest of the courtroom was drop-of-a-pin-silent.

Kidd gave Pell very little.

But he did acknowledge at the start of the proceedings that the cardinal was not being punished for what others might think he ­deserve the judicial cane.

“You are not to be made a scapegoat for any failings or perceived failings of the Catholic Church,’’ Kidd said.

“Nor are you being sentenced for any failure to prevent or report child sexual abuse by other clergy within the Catholic Church.

“You have not been charged with or convicted of any such conduct or failings.’’

Pell privately has said he had faith in the law and was submitting to its processes.

To that end, he would have liked Kidd’s following observation: “I must at law give full effect to the jury’s verdict. What this means is that I am required to accept, and act upon, (the surviving cathedral witness’s) account.

“That is what the law requires of me, and that is what I will do.’’

It is commonly acknowledged that 77-year-old Pell’s only chance of early release this year is if his ­appeal to a higher court is successful.

Even Pell’s chief accuser, the surviving witness from the cath­edral sex attacks, acknowledges that closure will come only when the appeal is dealt with.

“It is hard for me to allow myself the gravity of this moment,” he said through his lawyer, Viv Waller.

“The moment when the sentence is handed down. The moment when justice is done. It is hard for me, for the time being, to take comfort in this outcome.

“I appreciate that the court has acknowledged what was inflicted upon me as a child. However, there is no rest for me.

“Everything is overshadowed by the forthcoming appeal.”

For Pell, the appeal is a case of where there is life, there is hope.

If he loses, as the good judge noted, he may simply rot in jail.