They should have droppet the whole trial/hearing part
To really think an exentric engineer had the capibility to fake "the whole thing" and fooling all scientist across the globe. Then having Dr Arroway lie and fake her experience... It's just silly and not realistic. A hearing would not have been held before every peice of evidence from the mission had been scrutinized, thus discovering the 18 hours of static and a load of other evidence. And also, it is mentioned in the movie that scientists believe the device actually could be a portal/wormhole. If thats the case, then what happened to Dr Arroway was completely expected and a very reasonable.
Science was very underrepresented in the movie, instead we had alot of God Vs Atheism going on. This movie would have been a 10/10 without all the religious nonsense and useless moral context.