The dissenting judge in Pell's Victorian Court appeal was Mr Mark Weinberg.

His dissent opened the door to Pell's appeal to the High Court.

The question that I ask is: Were Pell and Weinberg both aware prior to this appeal that this dissent would open the door to Pell's appeal to the High Court?

I think they were both aware that this would happen if one of the Victorian judges was to dissent. I also believe that the other two Victorian judges were aware of the ramifications that the dissent would have.

I think it is clear what was going on. I think that not only would they have known that it would open the door to a High Court appeal but that they also knew that the High Court would be compelled to acquit Pell if at least one of the Victorian judges specified that there had been insufficient evidence to convict Pell.

I believe everybody knows what has happened but nobody can do anything about it. It is now an argument over questions of ethics and morality. I can tell you that I have absolutely no respect for the courts and their officers. In my opinion, both are an absolute joke!

Mr0

While your generally fact free posts are usually at best amusing, your last post is pure fantasy.

Even if the Victorian appeal court had ruled unanimously against Pell, this would not have blocked a high court appeal. That the high court judgement was unanimous and scathing of the appellate decision shows that the result was pretty much inevitable.

What the dissenting appellate judge did was to spell out clearly and succinctly the flaws in the evidence which the other two judges should have taken seriously. That they didn't will blight their careers.

Shadow Minister,

Big comments from someone who is just an engineer.

It is all now a debate over questions of ethics and morality on the role of courts and judges.

Dear Big Nana,

"There has been speculation that the jury in the first trial was split 10-2 in favour of a not-guilty verdict for Pell but this was not published by a reputable source. The truth is, we don’t know the result and we probably will never know because jurors are not allowed to talk about it and it’s unable to be reported."

So can you give me a single named credible source please. This has just been repeated often enough it has a completely unjustified apparent veracity.

Dear Shadow Minister,

Look I get that much of the backing of the right for Pell has come because he was a confidant of your poster boy Abbott and had as a referee the right's idol Howard and well as the absolute support of the right's media darling Bolt, but the degenerates who terrorised the children around Ballarat and the Western Districts, many of them who have ended up behind bars would normally have had you lot screaming blue murder. How your ideology has twisted your normal leanings is fascinating.

The High Court said "It may be accepted that the Court of Appeal majority did not err in holding that A's evidence of the first incident did not contain discrepancies, or display inadequacies, of such a character as to require the jury to have entertained a doubt as to guilt."

But that the jury needed to set that aside because the evidence of the other four witnesses, not to the actual events on the day but the supposed events given Church practices, is in and of itself enough to dismiss the case regardless of the veracity of the witness.

So what they are essentially saying is even if the other boy had not spiraled into a life of heroin addiction within a year of the abuse ultimately leading to his death and instead had been able to testify they would have came to the same judgement.

This appears to be absurd

I'm surprised no-one's commented on the journoes' ignoring of social distancing when they scrambled around Pell ?

Chris,

"...or the police that charged him"

Aren't they the same police who advertized for complainants?