Australia’s highest court has tossed conviction of Cardinal George Pell, found guilty of historic child sex crime and sentenced to 6 years in prison. The cardinal, former Vatican treasurer, was once a close aid to Pope Francis.
"The High Court found that the jury, acting rationally on the whole of the evidence, ought to have entertained a doubt as to the applicant's guilt with respect to each of the offences for which he was convicted, and ordered that the convictions be quashed and that verdicts of acquittal be entered in their place," a Queensland High Court said in a statement on Tuesday.

Pell was convicted by a jury in Australia of five counts of historic sex crimes in December, 2018. Pell, who is the most senior Vatican figure to ever be found guilty of the sexual abuse of a minor was sentenced to six years behind bars with a possibility of parole and has served 405 days out of his sentence before the groundbreaking verdict was overtuned unanimously on Tuesday.

The case against Pell was solely based on the testimony of one of his alleged victims - a former choirboy who said that the cardinal, then an archbishop of Melbourne, sexually abused him and another boy in late 1996 and early 1997.
Justifying their decision to set the cleric free, the seven-judge panel cited the accounts provided by “opportunity witnesses” who described the movements of the cardinal at the time of the reported crime - which allegedly took place during the Sunday mass - strikingly differently than the complainant.