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This recent NSW Court of Criminal Appeal decision on sentencing for child sexual abuse addresses two important issues that also are relevant to tomorrow's sentencing of George Pell: caselaw.nsw.gov.au/decision/5c7df…
The charges Pell has reportedly been found guilty of are one count of sexual penetration of a child aged between 10 and 16 and four counts of indecent act with a child aged between 10 and 16: 
The 1st issue is the whether Pell's 'care, supervision or authority' over the two victims is relevant to his sentence. The sexual penetration count has two penalties: level 5 (10 years), or level 3 (20 years) if the child was under the defendant's care, supervision or authority.
According to all the reports I've read, the jury was not asked to find whether or not Pell had care, supervision or authority over the two choirboys. Because of that, the level 3 imprisonment is not available, and the maximum for each charge is 10 years imprisonment.
But can Chief Judge Kidd still take Pell's position of authority (or supervision or care) over the choirboys into account? After all, the facts allege that he used his authority as archbishop over the kids to abuse them.
At least for the first charge of sexual penetration, the answer is no. That's because of an important but fairly uniquely Australian rule of sentencing called the rule in De Simoni's case: classic.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/H…
In De Simoni's case, the accused bashed the victim to rob her. He pled guilty to robbery, but not to the aggravated offence of robbery with physical violence. The High Court held that this meant that the judge had to ignore the actual harm he did to her when he sentenced her.
By the same token, the prosecution (for whatever reason) didn't ask the jury to find that the choirboys were under Pell's care, supervision or authority (which can be a fairly technical issue.) So, Kidd has to ignore any authority etc Pell had over the two choirboys.
But there are two outs for Kidd. One is the out relied on by the NSWCCA in its appeal (which involved a music teacher assaulting his student.) The NSWCCA held that it was OK for the judge to aggravate the sentence because of 'breach of trust', not 'abuse of authority':
If that's right and applicable in Victoria, then Kidd could aggravate Pell's sentence because he breached the trust that the kids' parents placed in him as head of the Catholic Church in Melbourne.
But I'm not sure it's right - isn't breach of trust pretty much the same as 'abuse of trust' which is an aggravating circumstance in NSW? - or applicable in Victoria (which also aggravates on the basis of 'position of care or supervision'.
The other out is that the 'indecent act' offences that Pell was found guilty of do NOT have an aggravation of abuse of care, authority, etc. So, weirdly, there is no rule stopping Kidd taking account of these matters for those offences.
(But I dunno if it would be right for Kidd to apply the law in this way. It seems too weird and would be inviting some sort of sentence appeal. The then law was flawed, it seems, but that isn't Pell's problem.)
Now, there's a second issue raised by the NSWCCA case: under NSW law, you aggravate the sentence if the victims are vulnerable. The NSW defendant complained that his sentencing judge found that his victims (aged between 9 and 15) were vulnerable.
Of course, no sane person would claim that child sexual abuse victims aren't vulnerable. But the defendant claimed that the vulnerability of children is already factored into the offence of child sexual abuse, which has varying penalties based on age.
The NSWCCA rejected this argument. Neither a child's vulnerability nor his or her particular age is an element of the offence of child sexual abuse. So, of course a judge can take vulnerability via age into account.
So, yes, Kidd can take account of the fact that the children were aged 13 (or so - I've heard reports one was 12.) That is, Kidd can take account of the fact that the children were not 14 or 15 but the more vulnerable age of 13.
If Pell had committed his offences more recently, the age of the children would have put his offending at the worst end of the relevant offence, which is now about children between 12 and 16.
The current offence now carries a penalty of 15 years imprisonment (not 10 years as in 1996) and also has a 'standard sentence' (the sentence for the middle range of offenders) of 6 years (which would translate, I guess, to 4 years under the old offence.)
But under the 1996 offence, Pell's victims were not at the worst end of the scale in terms of vulnerability - that would be the 10 and 11 year-olds. So, I think Kidd could not aggravate Pell's sentence that much on this basis.
All up, Kidd is forced into some mental gymnastics to sentence Pell - he probably has to ignore Pell's position of authority and has to scale Pell's offending against similar abuse of 10 year-olds, rather than 12 year-olds as he would today.
I may brave a prediction tomorrow on Pell's sentence, but for now I will stick to my existing assertion that his sentence is likely to be years, not decades - the main offence will be something like 4 or 5 years, and the 4 other offences will add less than that each, & overlap.
(BTW, the music teacher got 24 years and that was upheld by the NSWCCA. But he was convicted of 27 counts over a 13 year-period, including making child porn of his victims. On the other hand, he pled guilty.)
