If his appeal fails I think the Church has pretty much no option but to laicise him.
As for the Australian judicial process, it strikes me as very fair. I was surprised to learn that they still have committal proceedings, a now archaic part of English law that apparently lives on in Australia. The significance of the committal proceedings is that it’s an opportunity for a magistrate to determine whether there’s a basis for the case to proceed to trial. In Pell’s case he did proceed to trial, but with some charges dropped already at that stage. This suggests that the evidence and the basis for the prosecution have received very genuine judicial scrutiny.
The decision to split the case between two trials and to impose reporting restrictions on the earlier trial was also very fair. It guaranteed that the charges heard in the second trial would fall or stand on their own merit without the jury having heard prejudicial material pertaining to unrelated charges. Those other charges have now been dropped, suggesting, again, that prosecutors are applying a strict threshold when deciding what charges to pursue in court.
The fact that the first trial ended in a hung jury is also, to my mind, quite encouraging. Rather than suggesting that the case is weak, I’d argue that it suggests that an Australian jury takes very seriously its responsibility to arrive at a decision that it believes in with certainty. The second jury reportedly deliberated for almost four days, which suggests again that they take their responsibility very seriously. The prosecutors must also have considerable belief in their case to consider it worthwhile to proceed with a second trial.
As for the evidence, I doubt that anyone on this forum was in court to hear the whole trial, so we can only guess the full details of what took place. While people often assume that these cases are simply a matter of one person’s word against another’s, there is actually a lot more to it. The trial lasted four and a half weeks. That’s a long time to study all the evidence laid before the court.
One also has to wonder quite why anybody would make something like this up and stick to his story through a police investigation, committal proceedings, and two long jury trials. That is quite something to go through, and all the more so when you’re doing it under the scrutiny of the entire world’s media.
So I’ll be happy to see what happens when the case reaches the appeal stage. If the conviction is quashed I’ll trust that the Australian courts have reached the correct verdict, but likewise if the conviction is upheld I’ll be happy to trust that he really was guilty.
