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Anybody wanting to revel in a rip-roaring rampage of revenge would have been pretty well-satisfied by reading Daphne Caruana Galizia’s article about the alleged teenage gang rapes incidents. The glaringly obvious fact that it was a thinly disguised hit job on criminal lawyer Giannella Caruana Curran escaped no-one and was not particularly intriguing except for the kind of people who love watching Jerry Springer slagfests and experiencing the thrill of watching other’s discomfiture while someone else engages in the mud-throwing. It is also drearily repetitive stuff. Roughly one of every eight articles by Daphne is an indirect attack on Caruana Curran.
Personal feuds bore me. If I want to read about revenge I dig out ‘The Godfather’ and get the Italian version. What I found objectionable about the article was the way personal animosity for one lawyer, turned into a senseless diatribe against the whole profession with all practitioners being tarred with the same brush. Jumping onto the bandwagon occupied by the people who have a ‘lanzita’ for any professional who wears a suit and dares charge for his services, Daphne let loose against lawyers. In doing so, she helped no-one, neither the accused whose right to a fair trial was prejudiced, nor the alleged victims who might very well find that the accused are released because of some Court ruling that their rights to a fair trial were in fact prejudiced by pre-trial publicity.
More potentially prejudicial pre-trial publicity came in the form of the Bondiplus show about the alleged rapes in Marsascala. Programmes such as these are very good for ratings, but for little else. They foster a climate of hysteria where judgements are made on a purely emotional level after a very one-sided hearing of the alleged victims of crime. It does not help the persons charged with the crime because of the instant hatred conjured up in their regard when viewers hear about an iron bar being inserted into a protesting girl’s vagina. The viewing public recoils on hearing such a statement, the knee jerk response is to brand persons held in custody as filthy beasts deserving of the greatest punishment. Viewers will not stop to consider the fact that at this point, the behaviour described has not been proved to have taken place. When faced by a moving voice-over account of repeated rapes and sadistic acts, viewers respond by rushing to judgement. Only last week a reader wrote in to The Malta Independent bristling with anger because the teenagers’ arrest had not been upheld. This reader simply wasn’t ready to hear a word in their defence. “There’s no smoke without fire” he declared furiously. There you have it. Instant judgement and never mind getting a fair trial or at least “tisma l-qanpiena l-ohra.” Lou Bondi’s mutterings about the presumption of innocence and additional “allegedly’s” are no match for the emotive impact of the plaintive description of abuse echoing out of our television sets. The teenage boys and girls arrested will never get a fair trial by a jury. There has been too much prejudicial pre-trial publicity in their regard.
Like many members of the public, Daphne and Lou Bondi view so-called legal technicalities which allow the accused to be let off, with suspicion. With their ill-timed and ill-judged messages in the media, they have provided the perfect legal technicality for defence lawyers to utilise (In fact the matter has been raised in Court and the presiding magistrate has ruled that proceedings will be held behind closed doors precisely to prevent further instances of potential prejudice).
Daphne started of her article by comparing criminal lawyers to well-paid drain cleaners. Adopting the voice of conscience, she went on to dismiss successful defences which have been resorted to in the past and says that lawyers presenting these defences (which after all, were believed by a jury) must find it awfully difficult to square something like this with their conscience, snidely adding “assuming, that is, that one has a conscience in the first place.”
Non-criminal lawyers also came in for a bit of rap. According to Daphne they cannot understand that some behaviour while legal, is also wrong and immoral. Then there was the gleeful observation that the members of the Attorney General’s office now knows that the public is on their side and not on the side of the criminal lawyers. In a ‘Read my lips’ Bush moment, Daphne goes, “Make no mistake: it is very important for the prosecution to understand that the vast majority of the population is rooting for it, and not for the defence. When you are performing in court, as elsewhere, high morale and the feeling that people are with you all the way, are crucial.” With a swipe of her pen Daphne has transformed the whole due process of justice into a three-ringed circus where the prosecuting officers will fare badly if they do not have public cheer leaders and super-annuated pom-pom girls in the guise of columnists cheering them on from the side-lines. Ridiculous statements such as the above show how alien the court system is to Daphne. The Attorney General’s office is made up of serious people intent on carrying out their job well. They are not concerned with being candidates in imaginary popularity contests. It would be a very bad thing if it were so, as it would mean that prosecuting lawyers would have to have a straw poll to check out their popularity rating before going ahead and doing their job. “Income tax evader? Nah – don’t go after him, he’s every man’s hero. Murderer? No problem – just check out the MISCO survey about our popularity ratings, and if we’re topping the charts, it’s handcuffs and leg-irons for him.”
In actual fact it’s nothing like that. A police officer who has a reasonable suspicion that a crime has been committed may arrest a suspect and have him charged. The arrest is not a punishment. It is not meant to serve as a public spectacle or deterrent similar to the public hangings of yore. A suspect is arrested because there exist legal grounds for doing so. These are listed in the law and include the possibility of his or her tampering with evidence, intimidation of witnesses or the possibility that he might abscond. So an arrest is really a practical measure of a preventive nature. Once the arrested person has been charged, he or she may apply for bail which is granted more often than not. That’s because the restriction of liberty should be the exception, not the norm. Some may clamour when they see people whom they have already judged as guilty, walking about freely, but legal systems whereby persons accused are not given bail often result in cruel situations like that where popular Italian presenter Enzo Tortora spent years in jail on a lying turncoat’s evidence, before being declared innocent.
The lawyers who defend persons accused of even the most atrocious crimes do not condone the crimes. They may feel repelled by the alleged wrongdoing, but they are not there to pronounce guilt. What they do is challenge the prosecution’s charge in the manner allowed by law. So they cross-examine the accuser to see if his story pans out, they see if their client actually participated in the commission of the crime or was just an accidental bystander. Admittedly, they do this in an environment which is hostile to them, but the fact that they get on with it means that ultimately justice is served. There is no better illustration of this than the case of Jamal Badawi, an Arab youth charged with the rape of a Maltese woman in the Floriana subway last year. His name was splashed all over the newspapers and there were many who pronounced him guilty. His lawyer (incidentally one of the lawyers defending one of the teenagers accused of gang rape) did not join the crowd baying for Badawi’s head. He defended him and produced DNA evidence which absolutely ruled out Badawi’s possible involvement in the crime. That lawyer was not the scum of the earth when he defended a person accused of rape who was eventually declared innocent, and neither is he now because he is acting for one of the Marsascala teenagers.
I feel very strongly about cases of sexual abuse or violence, especially if the victims are helpless and unable to defend themselves. It is my wish to see the perpetrators of such abuse identified and punished as soon as possible. What I do not want is to have one of the accused teenagers in the present case, in a situation like Badawi’s with his lawyer being viciously attacked for doing a job which is vital to ensure that justice is done. Revenge? No. Judgement? Yes – but not on Daphne and Lou’s say-so.
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