Quote: (02-28-2019 05:30 AM)bonkers Wrote:
So Cardinal George Pell has been found guilty and it was decided by a jury. He has appealed but has not been granted bail.
Will it get overthrown on appeal? And will the appeal be through judge or jury?
Whether it gets overthrown on appeal basically depends on one thing: whether the appeal court takes the view that the jury's decision was one that no reasonable bunch of flatheads could have come to.
Juries don't give reasons for their decisions. That's one reason "perverse" verdicts of not guilty can sometimes be returned: where a political prosecution is knocked out by a jury that thinks the law itself is unjust, and accordingly records an acquittal despite the evidence being overwhelming.
This appeal will likely be based on the reverse: the jury returns a verdict of guilty where no reasonable jury thinking shit through would convict. For example, the prosecution puts Donald Trump on the stand and accuses him of fucking horses but doesn't put a single witness, photo, or other piece of evidence proving the crime or even suggesting he's committed the crime.
A jury returning a verdict of guilty in those circumstances would very clearly have returned a verdict that no reasonable jury could. For a verdict of guilty, the jury has to have evidence to act on.
Another example: where Donald Trump is charged with breaking low flight ordinances by walking on air, and the evidence for the charge is a single deranged fuckwit who screams that he saw Trump strolling on foot past the 3rd floor window of a skyscraper at 10 in the morning on 12 July, 1998. Again, were the jury to convict on that evidence, it would be a verdict no reasonable jury could return, because the evidence simply does not concord with the laws of physics.
In essence, the appeal court has to agree that no reasonable jury could have been convinced beyond reasonable doubt of the accused's guilt given the evidence that was provided.
In Pell's case, the evidence comes down to one, uncorroborated witness. There apparently was another ... who was dead of a heroin overdose shortly before Pell was charged. There are apparently a number of physical impossibilities or very-high-improbabilities on that evidence. Supposedly Pell is meant to have forced two altar boys to suck his cock in one of the changing rooms of the cathedral right after saying mass, when Pell was apparently still in his clerical robes. Leaving aside arguments about the precise where the offences occurred, the biggest issue that Pell's likely to point to is that the robes in question physically cannot allow a priest to access his own dick until he takes the whole shebang off, which the accusers say didn't happen; they say he pulled his robes aside and made them grab his dick. Pell did not testify during the trial, but he did deny the crimes when the police recorded him on video and asked for his response to the allegations.
Whether or not Pell gets his conviction overturned on appeal is an open question, but it's certainly a vote in favour of Gerry Spence's dictum that sheer conviction carries credibility far more than logic would dictate.
As for me, I have my doubts. Remember this is the second time Pell was on trial for this crime. The first time, the trial ended in a hung jury, i.e. the jury was deadlocked with at least three jurymembers refusing to agree on a verdict - guilty or not - with the remainder of the jury. A hung jury first time round is, to me, always a red flag for the reliability of a conviction because it indicates either high emotions in the jury or some very different ideas about what the evidence proves. Worse still when the evidence comes down to the word of one witness: this case was the equivalent of he said, she said ... which crops up a lot in child abuse cases to be fair, but if the jury decided to convict solely because they liked the complainant more than Pell, that would be a bad basis for a decision. The principles and what's at stake are similar as with false rape accusations against men: no complaint to police at the time -- understandably -- and also no other witness to the crime.
The appeal court would be made up of three judges, and what would be at issue would be either that there was a miscarriage of justice by reason of an unreasonable jury verdict, or there was an error of law in how the judge summed up to the jury.
Pell made two mistakes on this: he refused to take the witness stand (or was advised not to) and he was content with a trial by jury rather than by judge alone. He made the second mistake I think because he was worried about the PR if he got acquitted by a legal mind rather than 12 ordinary people, but the first mistake I think he made because, regardless of what they tell you, it's never, never a good look to sit silent and never face up to your accusers under cross-examination.
Remissas, discite, vivet.
God save us from people who mean well. -storm