In Australia the leading case is the High Court’s decision in M v R in 1994 involving the sexual abuse of a minor. It held that it is not enough for the appeal court to have a doubt. The appeal court must take into account the fact that the jury had the advantage of seeing and hearing the evidence.

Precisely what they did with that advantage, of course, can never be known.

Where the so-called jury’s advantage of hearing and seeing the evidence can resolve the appellate court’s doubts, the verdict stands.

It is only “if the evidence, upon the record itself, contains discrepancies, displays inadequacies, is tainted or otherwise lacks probative force” that the appeal is allowed.

It is not enough for the appeal court judges (with all their experience and wisdom) to say, “We would never have convicted on that evidence.” The verdict would still stand.

“The jury is the body entrusted with the primary responsibility of determining guilt or innocence,” the majority judgement said.

But we can never have access to its reasoning.

Another judge in that case said the test is that an independent assessment of the evidence must establish that a reasonable jury MUST have had a reasonable doubt about guilt.

Usually conservatives support the jury system, but now that quite a few of them have attacked the Pell jury and therefore implicitly the system itself because one of their own got convicted under it, it might be a good time to have a really good look at juries.

Just because the system has been around for hundreds of years does not mean it is best practice. To the contrary, if you were designing a criminal justice system from scratch today you would not get 12 randomly selected people who know nothing of the law and simply might not be up to the task.

You would know from the body of the past century’s psychological research that people want to fit in and are easily swayed.

The fact that 12 people come to the same conclusion might be persuasive if they all came to that opinion independently. But they don’t. They do it in collusion

You might prefer a system with a senior judge to decide the law and two junior judicial officers who with the judge determine the facts. With three, it would check against biases and misconceptions. More importantly they would have to provide reasons for their verdict.

That in turn would enable an appeal court to check that the verdict and reasoning behind it were sound.

At present, an appeal court’s blind faith that a jury has made best use of seeing and hearing witnesses is unwarranted.

As for the Pell case in particular, how much better it would have been if a result had been delivered with reasons. As it is, it would be rather foolish for anyone to state an opinion one way or the other when not even journalists covering the case were allowed to hear or read the complainant’s evidence.

The Court of Appeal will at least be able to read it, but unless there are discrepancies, inadequacies or taints on the face of it, the court will, by law, have to accept that the complainant’s evidence rightly led to the verdict, even if they might not have come to that conclusion themselves or even disagreed with it.

Only doing away with juries will allow for a more reasoned approach in which appeal courts can overturn verdicts they are doubtful about. That is the case in Britain.

In Australia, on the other hand, might an appeal judge with a doubt on the evidence and facts that legally is not enough to overturn a verdict be tempted to go out of their way to find a legal technicality to lead the way to a quashing of the conviction and an acquittal or at least a new trial?