The decision means Pell, Pope Francis' former finance minister, will be released from an Australian prison after serving 13 months of a six-year sentence. The most senior Catholic found guilty of child sex abuse was convicted by a jury in 2018.
Pope Francis' former finance minister was convicted by a Victoria state jury in 2018 of sexually abusing two 13-year-old choirboys in a back room of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Melbourne in December 1996 while he was archbishop of Australia's second-largest city.
The High Court found that the Victorian Court of Appeal was incorrect in its 2-1 majority decision in August to uphold the jury verdicts. Pell did not testify at either trial or at the subsequent appeals. But the juries saw his emphatic denials in a police interview that was video recorded in a Rome airport hotel conference room in October 2016.
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