"Amid other indignities the system visits on jurors, it compels them to suffer in silence. But they are us. We citizens are potential jurors, and our response to future requests for our time might be: If you won’t trust us, why should we trust you?": https://www.smh.com.au/national/there-are-12-unmentioned-victims-in-the-pell-verdict-the-jurors-20200408-p54i3m.html

I agree that the position of jurors - I'd also add the other that hung, and even the six reserves - needs attention, and that the criminalisation of them speaking out, while beneficial in many ways, carries great costs as well. The Chamberlain case was a telling contrast.

But Knox gets some things wrong or imprecise in his article:
- "Since the ‘M’ case, there has evolved a mechanism for higher courts to overturn "unsafe", or egregiously misguided, jury verdicts". Nope, that mechanism has been in place for over a century and its operation...

...has been fiercely debated for all of that time, including in the Chamberlain case. Indeed, even though the test was settled in 1994, it continues to be debated and has generally shifted to a less protective approach since 1994.

- "The High Court’s 129-paragraph decision makes scant reference to case and statute law." The judgment is indeed mainly about the facts, but it does make a number of legal pronouncements, and clarifies that appeal judges have no role in judging witnesses' credibility/demeanour.

- "As Melbourne Law School Professor Jeremy Gans has written, by viewing videotape of trial evidence, higher courts have stealthily turned themselves into tribunals of fact." Nice to be cited - I assume from here: https://insidestory.org.au/pells-last-stand/ - but past instances of courts watching..

...videos have been unexceptional - the videos (of kids. etc) clearly needed to be watched. What Pell's Victorian court did was fairly new, but was done with the support of the prosecution and over Pell's objections. The DPP had previously complained that the same court didn't...

...watch videos when they overturned an earlier child abuse verdict. This case is among the first opportunities the High Court has had to rule on watching videos, and it unanimously ruled that they generally shouldn't be watched, including in this case, precisely because appeal..

...judges are different to jurors. Their main role is to review transcripts.

- "The Victorian Court of Appeal did that in the Pell case, which enabled the High Court to interpose itself in the same way." Nope. They didn't watch the videos at all and said the VSCA shouldn't have.

- "It’s a neat fiction: "We’re not re-trying the case, we’re only assessing another court’s viewing of videotape of parts of the case."" Nope, it's a false fiction. The HCA didn't assess the VSCA's viewing of the videos, except to say that the VSCA shouldn't have viewed them.

- "It is, perhaps illogically, the final court (which didn’t view the videotape but only read transcripts and heard argument from lawyers who were not at the Pell trial) which has the power to impose its interpretation upon the tribunal that saw the witnesses". That's right...

...although it gives short shrift to Mark Gibson and Ruth Shann, who were at Pell's trial and routinely interacted at both hearings with Boyce/Judd and Walker, who weren't. Appeal lawyers are often different to trial ones because the roles require different skills.

- "A misconception of the Pell case was that it was one man’s word against another’s. The complainant, under oath and severe cross-examination, provided his version. Pell availed himself of his so-called "right" to silence" Yes, but the jury saw his full police interview.

- " Instead, Pell’s case was advanced by church witnesses who speculated on the logistical difficulty of committing the sexual abuse in the circumstances that had been alleged." Unless the HCA has seriously misdescribed things, they did a good deal more than speculate.

- "Pell’s refusal to testify, for his own reasons, is not uncommon and cannot be held against him, but if he did turn his trial into one man’s word against another’s, and his case was so strong, he might never have spent one day in jail." Why? No lawyer I'm aware of thinks this.

- "Instead, the jury appears to have decided what many juries decide: the fact that committing this crime would have been risky and stupid did not mean Pell didn’t do it." They did , and that fact wasn't questioned at the High Court. The High Court case was all about opportunity.

- "There is one forseeable consequence of this verdict. Appeal courts are going to be crammed." Nope. The High Court did not change the law on unsafe verdicts from 25 years ago, except to narrow it by barring appeal judges from deciding witness credibility for themselves.

- "If higher courts can effectively retry cases and second-guess juries, if a legitimate ground for appeal is simply that the jury was "not rational" the system can get set for an avalanche of appeals." Nope. Such appeals have long been commonplace. About a fifth succeed.

- "When every fact they find can be second-guessed and retried by a higher panel of would-be jurors in legal robes – people who, by the way, have never sat on a jury – our 800-year-old "black box of justice" might as well ask if it has any purpose at all." A fair question but...

...one answer is that a serious conviction can't stand unless BOTH jurors and appeal judges find proof beyond reasonable doubt. Both jurors and appeal judgs are fallible, and it's arguable that requiring findings by both prevents miscarriages of justice.

(Knox's article says nothing at all about miscarriages of justice. It's the history of such miscarriages at trial level - which can be the fault of trial judges, jurors, defence lawyers, prosecutors, police or witnesses - that explains why appeal judges have these review powers.)

But, all that being said, Knox is right that events like Tuesdays can have significant effects on the jurors involved, and perhaps future ones, and. those things are well worth talking about. In Victoria, jurors are allowed to talk to their counsellors. But that's it.

It is worth wondering what we would lose - and what we could gain - if the jurors in this case were able to talk about their experiences in these two trials. That won't happen, though I also can't imagine all 24 jurors obeying the rules forever. Imagine being a family member!