''The evidence of Monday's decision raises serious questions about the match review panel's capacity to deliver coherent and credible football justice.'' - Tim Lane, BPL, June 22

That was last week, delivered at the end of this column's assessment of Chris Judd's escape from sanction after he split Matthew Pavlich's cheek. This week, another contentious case and a very different standard of justice imposed on Steven Baker. The match review panel's crisis of coherence and credibility is on red alert.

While there's no question that Baker committed a series of offences that warranted attention, there was nothing among them to deserve the savage penalty he received. One of the myriad problems with the system of justice delivered in 2005 by the AFL football operations manager, Adrian Anderson, is that it's too rigid to adequately assess scale and context. The word used by one legal friend whose view I sought today was "ham-fisted".

If a player commits enough minor offences, he can find himself more severely punished than a capital offender. Compared to Barry Hall's seven-week suspension for the worst king-hit ever captured by television cameras on an AFL ground, the Baker penalty is wildly disproportionate. It's the equivalent of giving a serial pick-pocket somewhere between 9 and 12 years jail, while the bloke who robbed a bank at gun-point gets off with seven.

While it's true that the Hall matter was handled by the tribunal, this doesn't excuse the fluctuations being delivered. Indeed, the fact that the scale of Hall's case required it to go directly to the tribunal only underlines the problem. Any misdemeanour that serious should have earned a penalty far greater than one imposed for a series of smaller offences handled by the match review panel. The two mechanisms are, after all, part of the one justice system. A prevailing sense of integrity should be evident across its decisions. The current AFL system patently fails to achieve this.

Hall's case should also have set a bench-mark. It was an egregious assault and, as such, should have set the bar for the worst forms of on-field violence. It seems, though, that to be a repeat offender - even at a relatively petty level - is worse. This simply doesn't make sense.

It's time to ask the question: how did it come to this?

Well, it must be acknowledged that when Anderson unveiled his radical new system of football justice in 2005 it was generally welcomed. Alas, this was a shallow, knee-jerk response from the many commentators who applauded its implementation. They imagined a system of box-ticking and points-accumulation would remove subjective judgements and make outcomes more predictable.

This was to overlook the fact that subjective judgements are still required before boxes are ticked. Furthermore, the system of points-reduction for clean records and early pleas, and loadings for bad records, has the potential to unreasonably distort outcomes and produce results like that imposed on Baker.

There is another problem with the match review panel as it currently operates that should be addressed urgently. Back in 2005 it seemed like a good idea to man it exclusively with men of on-field experience. Since it was instituted, it has been composed of two ex-players and one former umpire. If the only thing these men do is to tick boxes that might be adequate.

But they necessarily do more than that. They make judgements about what cases won't be prosecuted, such as Judd's last week; they consider incidents requiring delicate judgement as to whether breaches of the rules have been committed; and they must consider whether their various judgements retain a thread of consistency.

To man this panel with only "football people" was a populist decision taken at a time when Adrian Anderson was struggling for acceptance as the head of the AFL's football department. It hasn't worked. For the sake of its credibility, the match review panel at the very least requires an experienced legal member to show it the way. The alternative, and it's not a bad one, is that it be completely dismantled and a less simplistic approach to on-field justice restored.