The High Court of Australia has this morning granted Cardinal Pell's application for special leave and unanimously acquitted him. The decision means Cardinal Pell will be released from Barwon Prison today (Tuesday 7/04/20). In a statement to media, Cardinal Pell said the High Court's decision had remedied a "serious injustice".

The unanimous decision was handed down less than a month after the High Court of Australia heard two days of legal arguments from the Cardinal's lawyers and Victorian prosecutors.

The full bench's ruling was handed down by Chief Justice Susan Kiefel in a baron High Court registry in Brisbane, due to physical-distancing measures introduced in response to the current coronavirus pandemic.

Chief Justice Kiefel delivered the ruling at 10:00am, Queensland local time.

Cardinal Pell, 78, had been serving a six-year jail sentence after being convicted in 2018 of abusing two choirboys in the 1990s, when he was the archbishop of Melbourne. He had been accused of committing the crimes after he found the boys swigging altar wine in the priests' sacristy after mass in Melbourne's St Patrick's Cathedral.

A jury convicted him in 2018, a decision that the Victorian Court of Appeal upheld in a two-to-one decision. But his lawyers went to the High Court, arguing the appeal court failed to take proper account of evidence that cast doubt on his guilt.

Today the High Court handed down its decision, granting Cardinal Pell's application for special leave and unanimously acquitting him.

Cardinal Pell was a junior priest in Swan Hill in the early 1970’s.

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