Life is about to get very different for disgraced cardinal George Pell.
For the past 170 days, the 78-year-old has spent 23 hours each day in solitary confinement next door to notorious multiple murderer James Gargasoulas.
But his time at the Melbourne Assessment Prison is coming to an end and a new reality is about to confront him.
Pell is going to be moved out of central Melbourne to a remote country prison in Ararat, 205km northwest of the Melbourne CBD, where he will be surrounded by Victoria’s worst sex offenders.
Pell will call the Hopkins Correctional Facility home for the remainder of his six-year sentence provided he doesn’t take his conviction to the High Court of Australia to have it quashed.
The move will see him imprisoned with his former housemate and convicted paedophile Gerard Ridsdale, as well as a number of other disgraced members of the cloth.
The prison has a capacity for 762 inmates and includes a swimming pool and more room for Pell to move around, but it won’t be a walk in the park.
It will, however, be less dangerous. Pell, a high profile convicted sex offender, would have been targeted if left to mingle with the population at MAP.
The Age reports that Pell will be subject to an “intensive review by Correction Victoria’s Sentence Management Unit” and he’ll be asked where he would like to see out his sentence.
But he will very likely be placed at Hopkins.
The prison once housed Brian Keith Jones, known as Mr Baldy, a child molester who stole six boys and raped them between 1979 and 1980 before his release in 2005.
It also housed Michael Glennon, a former Roman Catholic priest who abused 15 children and was jailed for 26 years. He died at Hopkins Correctional Facility in 2014, aged 69.
RELATED: Inside the courtroom as a devastated George Pell is sent straight back to prison
Ararat is home to two facilities — Hopkins and Corella Place. Corella Place is where paedophiles and sex offenders who have finished serving prison sentences go when they are unable to re-enter the general population. Mr Baldy is there now.
Known as the Village of the Damned, the facility is surrounded by barbed wire and those who live there are forced to wear ankle bracelets so authorities know where they are at all times.
Online, Hopkins is described as a medium security facility that offers “single, double and triple-bed accommodation” as well as “cottage accommodation”.
If Pell does not end up at Hopkins, the next most likely option is Langi Kal Kal Prison, between Ballarat and Ararat.
It, too, has a majority population of convicted sex offenders.
RELATED: Judge rules ‘significant possibility’ Cardinal George Pell didn’t commit child sex offences
Pell lost his appeal against five historic sexual abuse convictions earlier today by a two-to-one majority. The Court of Appeal judges ruled he did in fact abuse two 13-year-old boys at Melbourne’s St Patrick’s Cathedral in 1996.
Chief Justice Anne Ferguson and Court of Appeal President Chris Maxwell dismissed it, while Justice Mark Weinberg upheld the appeal.
The two judges agreed it “was open to the jury to be satisfied beyond reasonable doubt Cardinal Pell was guilty as charged” and also dismissed the appeal on technical grounds.
Justices Ferguson and Maxwell dismissed all 13 of the “obstacles” put forward by Pell’s lawyers and found there was nothing in the complainant’s evidence that would cause the jury to doubt his account of what took place.
“Part of Cardinal Pell’s case on the appeal was that there were 13 solid obstacles in the path of a conviction. Justice Maxwell and I have rejected all 13,” Justice Ferguson said.
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "George Pell appeal: Cardinal loses in court, on his way to Ararat - NEWS.com.au"
Post a Comment