EDITOR'S NOTE: The High Court overturned Cardinal George Pell's conviction for historic child sex offences in a judgment handed down April 7, 2020. In a unanimous decision all seven High Court judges found Victoria's Court of Appeal should not have upheld Pell's conviction. It found the evidence could not support a guilty verdict.

When a jury found Cardinal George Pell guilty of sexual offences against two boys at Melbourne's St Patrick’s Cathedral, it was not the end of the justice system’s consideration of his case. It was just the end of the beginning. Next comes the appeal, which will begin today.

If you watch American crime procedural, you may well think that appeals are always about questions of law. Indeed, Pell’s lawyers will raise two such matters at his appeal, both about video screens. Was it OK to start Pell’s trial even though the potential jurors were all in another room watching events on a big screen? And did Chief Judge Peter Kidd make a mistake at the end of Pell’s trial when he stopped barrister Robert Richter from showing the jury a video animation of people moving around St Patrick’s?

However, Australian appeals (and British, Canadian and New Zealand ones) differ from American ones in an important way. Anyone found guilty of any crime here can also argue that the jury’s verdict was simply wrong. Pell has asked the Court of Appeal to rule that his jury ought to have had a reasonable doubt about his guilt. The formal ground is that the jury’s verdict is "unreasonable or cannot be supported having regard to the evidence". English courts ask the same question in a simpler way: is the verdict unsafe?

How does an appeal court work out whether a jury got it wrong? Australia’s High Court decided 25 years ago that the appeal judges must look at the evidence themselves and decide if it leaves them – or at least two of the three appeal judges – in doubt about the defendant’s guilt. The judges must allow for the fact that the jury sees all the witnesses testify, while the appeal judges don’t, but that caveat isn’t so important in Pell’s case. The appeal judges will be able to watch the testimony of the most important witness – the man who says he was one of two boys Pell abused at St Patrick’s – on video.