By a majority of 2-1 Cardinal George Pell has lost his Appeal against his conviction for 5 charges of child abuse in 1990.  The Appeal Court in Melbourne spent 11 weeks deciding whether or not the Jury in the trial made the wrong decision. As was made clear in their judgement, Appeal Courts don't like to substitute their views for that of a Jury and would only do so if they were satisfied that the evidence was so weak that the Jury's verdict was completely unreasonable. Ultimately the majority decided that there was sufficient evidence for the jury to to decide that Cardinal Pell was Guilty. Interestingly, the Judge who was in favour of Cardinal Pell, namely Justice Mark Weinberg, was a former DPP of Victoria and the most experienced Criminal lawyer on the Court As Chief Justice Anne Ferguson put it, the question was whether it was 'reasonably open to the jury' to bring in a verdict of Guilty.  Two of the Judges accepted that the complainant in the case came over as a believable witness whilst one judge considered the complainants account to be 'implausible and unconvincing'. The Judges accepted that evidence from the witnesses who worked in the Cathedral showed that Cardinal Pell followed a predictable routine after Mass which the defence argued meant that he could not have committed the assaults in the way alleged and they accepted that the nature of religious ritual demanded consistency. However the majority then rejected that evidence on the basis that the predictable nature of Mass meant that the witnesses could not really remember the details of a specific Mass 29 years earlier The majority also rejected the defence suggestion that the nature of the vestments that Cardinal Pell wore at Mass meant that the assaults were physically impossible. Having seen and examined the Vestments, they held that the Assaults as alleged were physically possible. So is this the end of the legal road for Cardinal Pell? Probably, yes. He can lodge an Appeal with the High Court of Australia but that Court usually only deals with cases where there are questions of law which are constitutional or which have wideranging implications and the Pell case really revolves around its own very specific facts.  That said, the fact that the Judgment of the Court of Appeal was not unanimous may make the Judges in the High Court interested in looking at the facts themselves but its very much of a long shot.