I actually read it as not contradictory. This was about two events: one which was a priori more probable than the other, based purely on the previous experience

I actually read it as not contradictory. This was about two events: one which was a priori more probable than the other, based purely on the previous experiences of the judge. That is, he considered "X probably happened because Y has a history of happening less than X". I take that to be that the judge committed a classic fallacy: he took a frequentist, limit-in-the-long-run subjective judgement, and tried to apply it to a situation where it's really not applicable. He took his priors from a mistaken frequentist consideration, that is what I interpret the first quote to say. What he should have done, the second quote says, is to "arrive[s] at its conclusion by considering on an overall assessment of the evidence". Instead of considering what happened before, he should have taken his priors from the evidence. So, in the end, it's a sentence that supports a Bayesian methodology, in this case. Or maybe the Court of Appeal just was confused at the time, who knows.