Down the Hill wrote:Whilst most are not comfortable with a community sports issue ending up in the Supreme Court - my take on the whole matter is that the judge wasn't being asked to rule on the player's guilt or the appropriate number of weeks suspended. His jurisdiction was to to determine if the AdFL had used due process and followed a consistent approach with other suspension considerations of recent years. I assume evidence was tendered to show that many suspensions for a player with no prior history includes a "suspended" component and that the player was challenging that aspect of his suspension rather than guilt. It seems the player believes a suspension of 2(1) is the maximum he should have been offered which would have allowed him to play his 4th match tomorrow. So the ruling does not mean the league got things wrong in finding the player guilty which is also supported by the players plea. And lets face it - the video evidence supports a guilty plea and finding. It just means the original MRP / Tribunal decision has been invalidated but does not prevent the league from re-hearing the matter which is what media reports indicate they will be doing tonight. I'm just glad I'm not in the shoes of those sitting in judgement.
I don't disagree with your assessment.
Equally, I think its strange that a judge is asked to assume what the 3 members of the AdFL tribunal were thinking when they landed on the 3 games.
Your view that they could have suspended a portion of it is a reasonable assumption to come to.
But equally, how do we not know that rather than concluding they were being harsher by not suspending a portion of it it, who's to say that they were extremely lenient and actually removed it all together. IE: He would have gotten 4 on its own, that becomes 3 + (1) with his good history, and the tribunal found that given his clean record included a large portion of AFL where you get done for the most trivial of matters, and therefore his clean recorded is worth even more of a discount, so dropped it back to just 3 on its own.
Passing judgement on facts is difficult enough.
Passing judgement on judgement is just a guessing game in my opinion.
Posted: Fri Aug 12, 2022 10:15 am
but i can tell ya my lad got dropped from the B's to the C's if that helps 
