Why the Jury in Pell v The Queen Must Have Had a Doubt and the High Court was Right to Quash the Guilty Verdicts

Abstract

In the aftermath of the High Court’s decision in Pell v The Queen to quash the guilty verdicts and enter verdicts of acquittal in their place, there has been considerable public discussion and academic commentary on the respective roles of the jury and appellate courts, with particular focus on the jury as the tribunal of fact. Pell v The Queen was a high-profile case involving sexual assault charges against a Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, when just a year earlier the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse had published its final report which was dominated by abuses perpetrated in the Roman Catholic Church. This article considers the test for the unreasonableness ground of appeal set out by the High Court in M v The Queen, which is reflected in s 276(1)(a) of the Criminal Procedure Act 2009 (Vic), whether ‘upon the whole of the evidence it was open to the jury to be satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that the accused was guilty’; and concludes that the High Court was correct to adopt Weinberg JA’s dissenting judgment in the Victorian Court of Appeal which in the author’s view was compelling.