Letters | Sunday, 01 February 2009

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Court sentence that cannot be understood

I could not understand why Mr Steven Marsden was sentenced to 25 years in prison, plus a heavy fine, and a confiscation of 50,000 pills believed at that time of capture to be ecstasy pills.
Some days or months later, these pills were found not to contain the substance of ecstasy, but some other substance which was not illegal at that time.
On hearing this, the Attorney General still wanted his pound of flesh. He changed the bill of indictment from ‘drug trafficking’ to ‘conspiracy to commit a crime’, but what crime was it? There are very different kind of crimes, and each one of them carries different penalties. The Attorney General did not stop there. He argued that Marsden imported those pills under the impression that they were ecstasy. How could he be 100% sure what Marsden’s impression was?
Unfortunately the jury swallowed up the Attorney General’s version completely. Unfortunately, because it is unfortunate for a human being to be dumped in a prison cell for 25 years, on what another man, the Attorney General, thinks Mr Marsden’s impression was at the time.
If Mr Marsden was importing heroin or cocaine or ecstasy, I would have been happy had he been sentenced to 50 instead of 25 years. But if Marsden imported something that was not illegal at the time, he should have never been sentenced to imprisonment.
It’s about time the whole system – the jury system – gets an overhaul. The Court of Appeal and the Constitutional Court take time while somebody has to enjoy his cell.
That is not fair for any human being. And Marsden is one of them.

Joseph Muscat
Mosta

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