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Photo by Saeed Khan / AFP

A jury unanimously convicted Pell in December of abusing the two 13-year-olds in a rear room of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 1996 weeks after becoming archbishop of Melbourne, Australia’s second-largest city. But Pell wasn’t taken into custody immediately because he had surgery scheduled to have both knees replaced.

Pell’s lawyer Robert Richter had told the jury during the trial that “only a mad man” would take the risk of sexually abusing two boys in a cathedral room with the door open and people likely to wander in.

On Wednesday, Richter described the abuse as a “temporary loss of judgment” in response to an “irresistible impulse.”

According to The Guardian, he tried to argue there were “no aggravating circumstances” to one of the offences. It was “no more than a plain vanilla sexual penetration case where the child is not actively participating,” he told the court.

“It must be clear to you by now that I am struggling with that submission,” the judge responded. “Looking at your points here — so, what?”

Richter also tried to suggest that an incident in which Pell grabbed one of the boys by the genitals in an attack that lasted seconds was “fleeting” and not worthy of a jail sentence.

Photo by Michael Dodge/Getty Images

Kidd disagreed. “That wasn’t just a trifling sexual assault,” he said.

“Nothing is to be gained here by comparing different forms of sexual abuse of children. Of course I need to make a judgement of the overall gravity of this. But there is a limit to these kinds of comparisons.”