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There is no doubt that we are all a bunch of hypocrites. On one side we preach pro-life and against abortion and on the other side we keep silent on how lightly bodily harm and the loss of life is dealt with in Malta. What is the point of pontificating in favour of life and then failing to condemn the leniency within which bodily harm and homicides are treated?
Two weeks ago we had the case of that murderer who pleaded guilty to a double murder in the Santa Lucia case. Two elderly persons were at home when they were robbed and killed without any motivation or provocation from their part whatsoever.
The murderer pleaded guilty to both homicides and the court, for reasons it saw fit, condemned him to 30 years imprisonment. That means that if he behaves in the coming years, it will be reduced to twenty four years (eight months for every year of good behaviour) which also means that the murderer got a good deal by getting twelve years for each of the elderly that he killed. Not a bad deal at all!
The law makes it very clear that whosoever is guilty of wilful homicide must be punished with imprisonment for life. However, you know more than I do that that is very rarely the case. The only case that I can remember is the case of the Paola arson case when the perpetrator was sentenced to life and the principals were given leniency by the court: I do not recall other cases. Abroad, imprisonment for life is imprisonment for life and if you kill more than one person, you get a life sentence for every person that you killed and not a discount on your punishment.
It is true that plea bargaining is playing a major part in decreasing the backlog of trials by jury, but this should not be at the expense of the victims’ families and society in general. In the Santa Lucia case, I do not know what kind of plea bargaining the accused could have given except that he will testify in the case of the other co-accused. However, the law does not allow for such evidence to have any weight except if accompanied by other evidence. And experience shows that the jurors give little weight to the testimony of a co-accused.
Take the case of maiming and killing in road accidents. It pays to kill or maim somebody who is in your way by fabricating a road accident or by being careless because you can be punished for only up to five years imprisonment or to a Lm5,000 fine and if you have managed to make somebody a vegetable for life your punishment cannot exceed one year imprisonment or Lm2,000. It is so ironic that in the case of drug offences, under the pretext that we want to save lives, there is a minimum number of years imprisonment that the court has to impose, and there is no way that drug traffickers can get a probation or a suspended sentence.
Just as it pays to beat the teachers. Beat the teacher of your son or daughter, admit to the charges in court and you will get a good deal because so far the courts have only seen it fit to condemn an R&A that is, a reprimand and admonition. You are all familiar with the shows made by MUT when any of its members is faced with such a mishap but the MUT, for reasons I cannot explain, has never so far deemed it fit to exert pressure on the Government to amend the Criminal Code so that punishments of this sort are made more severe.
I fully sympathise with the teacher in B’Kara who could not believe her ears when I told her that she could not testify because the assaulters have pleaded guilty and were given an R&A. She kept asking why the court is not sensitive to the therapy that she was still taking for the trauma that she suffered as a result of the capricious behaviour of irresponsible parents, questions to which I had no reply.
If you want another case of how cheap life is in Malta just take a look at the sudden epidemic that has hit the cranes. As if one or two or three accidents were not enough in the last six weeks, maybe now that these accidents have registered their first victim, the Malta Transport Authority and the Health and Safety Authority can take serious action by first ordering that all cranes must be certified to be fit for use (real certification and not fictitious ones as in the case of some VRT operators); and secondly, introduce a license so that only licensed people can operate and assist in the loading of cranes. But the victim is still alive, and it seems the authorities are waiting for the first fatality before they wake up and give us some serious assurances.
Gozo must now wake up and abolish the stigma that if you want to murder somebody without being caught, do it in Gozo. History shows that, pro rata, the number of unresolved murder cases are mainly those that took place in Gozo. The murder of my colleague Dr Michael Grech is the second murder in Gozo this year and the first one is still unresolved. The public is tired of hearing rhetoric about the Gozitan culture and how zipped their mouths are – if the culture in Gozo is different to that in Malta, so must the investigations be. At the University of Malta, we have the Institute for Forensic Studies and I wonder whether, so far, it has seen fit to commission studies on the phenomena and on how investigations in Gozo are to be treated differently to those in Malta.
I bless the courage of any of my colleagues who take up the defense of the murderer of Dr Michael Grech. I know that it will not be an easy task for them or for the presiding judge, knowing that there is no guarantee that they will be spared the same fate of Dr Michael Grech.
Dear Michael, I dedicate this to you hoping that your life was not sacrificed in vain.
The brutal killing of my colleague Dr Michael Grech must be an eye opener. God forbid that the investigations reveal that the murder was connected to his work as a lawyer because that will prove that we have really scraped the bottom. The last time I saw and spoke to Michael was on his last Friday of his life when we had work to attend to at the Gozo Court.
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