The moving testimony of George Pell's surviving sexual assault victim is what prosecutors hope will keep the disgraced cardinal and registered sex offender behind bars.
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Australia's highest-ranking Catholic will have to wait to learn if his bid for freedom has been successful or whether a jury's guilty verdicts on five child sexual abuse charges, handed down in December, will stand.
Supreme Court Chief Justice Anne Ferguson, Appeal Court President Chris Maxwell and Justice Mark Weinberg will hand down their decision on his appeal at a later date after a two-day hearing in Victoria's Court of Appeal finished on Thursday.
READ MORE: Re-live the day as it unfolded here
They've not said when the decision will be handed down.
The 77-year-old cardinal is serving at least three years and eight months in prison for abusing two 13-year-old choirboys at St Patrick's Cathedral in 1996 and one of them again in 1997.
One of the boys died in 2014 but the other gave evidence at Pell's trial.
Senior crown prosecutor Chris Boyce QC urged the Court of Appeal to believe the evidence of the man, now in his 30s, above all others.
Mr Boyce was asked why his case should be preferred over that of Pell's trial barrister Robert Richter QC, who claimed the complainant was a calculated liar or deluded fantasist.
He said the answer was found in watching the man's evidence from start to finish.
After hearing the man's responses, "one puts down one's pen and stares blankly at the screen and is moved," Mr Boyce said.
"And at that point any doubt that one might have had about the account ... is relieved."
He said if the man was a liar or fantasist it would have been "easy" for him to invent the location as one being out of sight, rather than identifying it in the middle of the priest's sacristy, in view of the door.
They also quizzed him on the argument by Pell's lawyer that if the abuse really occurred, the two boys would have discussed it later.
Mr Boyce struggled to respond before suggesting the surviving boy might have been afraid of losing his scholarship.
"It's embarrassing though. It's so incredibly embarrassing - do you really want to talk to your friend about it?" Mr Boyce eventually responded.
He urged the judges to find the surviving victim's evidence more reliable than other prosecution witnesses who said they were with Pell.
Pell's appeal barrister Bret Walker SC has argued the jury's verdicts were "unsafe and unsatisfactory" because prosecution witnesses had given exculpatory evidence, including an alibi that Pell's practice was to greet parishioners after mass when the offending was said to have occurred.
"If (Pell) was at the western door, then the law of physics tells us this is literally, logically impossible for the offending to have occurred according to the complainant's account, and there is no other account," Mr Walker said.
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