It’s getting a little tiring to be proven right all the time. Not, mind you, that I would object if it occurred slightly less frequently: you know, the occasional court ruling here and there, illustrating that every once in a while, that lunatic journalist with the facial hair problem might actually be onto something when he argues that the man responsible for prosecution in this country ought to really consider taking up a career in showbiz instead. But each and every single time? I don’t know. There is, after all, only so much vindication a man can take, before he gets big-headed about it. And besides, after a while it just becomes boring. Especially when the things you are constantly proven right about should really be self-evident to anyone who possesses something called “a brain” (with or without a government licence).
Right. I assume naturally that most of you will have attended secondary school (complete with a nice Catholic crucifix on the wall – whoopie!) and will therefore be familiar with Sir Isaac Newton’s second law of motion: “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction”. So just as I find myself getting bored with the constant public vindications of my every single argument, the people on the opposite end of the spectrum must be getting rather cheesed off.
One of these people happens to be Malta’s Attorney General Dr Silvio Camilleri – or ‘He Who Wears Two Hats’, as his name would have been had he been born to a native American tribe – who has now spectacularly been proven wrong on two separate convictions in quick succession.
Both these miscarriages of justice involve mistaken presumptions of drug trafficking; both entail glaring breaches of fundamental human rights; and in both cases, the victims will be suing the State for compensation – and I, for one, will be very surprised if they lose.
But of course, it will not be Dr Camilleri to foot the bill when Malta’s name is once again dragged through the muck of international affairs. It will be the State, which, by the way, is funded by you and me.
And now, a word about the two cases themselves. The first was that of Steven Marsden, who was wrongly sentenced to 25 years’ imprisonment when he had actually committed no crime whatsoever. Unfortunately, this last detail appears to have escaped the attention of the good old ‘hang ’em high’ brigade – you know, the self-righteous multitudes, whose moral judgement is automatically submerged by a tsunami of violent emotion at the mere mention of the word “drugs”. (By my count, this brigade currently numbers around 412,182 people. That leaves exactly six exceptions in the entire country, namely: myself; Marsden’s defence lawyer Dr Joseph Brincat; the only one of nine jurors to return a Not Guilty verdict; and – happily – the three judges who make up Malta’s Court of Criminal Appeal).
You can look up back issues of this fine newspaper for more details; suffice it to say that Marsden imported 50,000 capsules of a chemical mistakenly identified as ‘ecstasy’ by the Malta police, which in turn was so chuffed by this discovery that it publicly trumpeted it as “largest ever ecstasy haul” – for which, as I understand, Malta was even rewarded by the Bush administration for its contribution to the ‘war on drugs’.
But alas! Fate had scripted things differently, and when the trial got under way, the court’s own forensic expert witness broke the sad news that – oh, dear – it was not ecstasy at all, but ‘MCCP’; and not only that... it wasn’t even illegal.
With hindsight, this can be seen to have placed Dr Camilleri in a bit of a pickle. Had he done the decent thing and withdrawn all charges, he would have made the Malta Police Force look stupid (something which, let’s face it, is... um... erm... oh, never mind). So what did he do? Simple: he changed the bill of indictment to press charges on the grounds that, even though the pills were not illegal, Marsden himself thought that they were.
Exactly how the prosecution intended to prove this claim beyond shadow of doubt is a question that only Dr Camilleri can hope to answer (though of course he never will – Attorney Generals don’t answer questions, it’s beneath their dignity). Curiouser still is the fact that the Court of Superior Jurisdiction didn’t throw the case clean out on its backside, as it so evidently should have. Instead, we were treated to truly a grotesque “parody of justice” (Joe Brincat’s words, not mine), in which Marsden stood accused of a crime the AG “thought he thought” he had committed... and of course, everyone and their moral prejudice went along for the ride.
Making matters even uglier was a transparent attempt to retroactively influence the jury, by legislating in such a way as to make Marsden’s actions appear illegal, when in fact they were not.
You see, when ‘He Who Wears Two Hats’ heard the court’s forensic expert explode the prosecution’s entire thesis, his reaction was (as it so often is) to simply remove one hat and wear the other... so off went the Chief Prosecutor headdress, and on came the ‘Government Advisor’ beret.
In this new attire, Dr Camilleri’s advice to government was to schedule MCCP on the Dangerous Drugs Ordinance: which the government duly did in May 2008, almost a year after Marsden’s arrest and preventive incarceration.
Soon after Marsden’s conviction, I wrote an article under the headline ‘Guilty until proven innocent’. My argument was basically this: if a man can be convicted and sentenced to 25 years because the prosecution “thought he thought” he was breaking the law... why, then the Attorney General can at the drop of a hat (ahem) press charges against anyone at will, over any presumed offence whatsoever, without feeling the need to produce a single jot of evidence.
Dr Camilleri, I might add, was not at all pleased. Nor was he enthused by another article I wrote at roughly the same time, about the second case in which he has spectacularly been proven wrong.
If you ask me, this one is even uglier. It concerns a Somali national named Aweys Maani Khayre, who was arrested at the airport with just over 20kg of a plant called ‘khat’. I won’t waste time with the sheer amount of garbage that was written about this by the misinformed and the unabashedly racist. But for the record – and contrary to public declarations which evidently influenced proceedings against him – he had entered the country legally, with full refugee status (provided by the UK), and complete with valid travel documents. Oh, and he had also bought his khat perfectly legally over the counter at a stall at London’s Portobello market.
Like MCCP, khat was not a scheduled plant at the time of its discovery in his luggage. But again, this didn’t stop the intrepid Dr Silvio Camilleri from charging him with drug trafficking. His reasoning was that, while the plant itself is not illegal, two of its chemical components, cathine and cathinone, are listed on the Dangerous Drugs Ordinance. But what Dr Camilleri conveniently omitted to mention – though the judges on the Criminal Court of Appeal would remind him three years later – was the following excerpt from the landmark House of Lords’ ruling in DPP vs Goodchild: “Any controlled drug... by its scientific name is not established by proof of possession of naturally occurring material of which the described drug is one of the constituents unseparated from the others.”
In passing judgement a few weeks ago, the Court of Appeal even passed the following, devastating remark: “However, and rather surprisingly in view of the above quotation, the Inferior Court went on to find the accused guilty of the importation and possession of both cathinone and of cathine – even though the court appointed expert, Mr Mario Mifsud, had clearly stated that he had only found the substance cathine in the plants imported by appellant.”
Consequently, Dr Camilleri’s office was at fault on two counts; one, for proceeding against Aweys on the basis of the chemical components of a substance, in direct defiance of established case law on the subject; and two, for pressing charges on importation of two separate chemical compounds, when only one was actually found in his possession.
Anyway, after a tortuous ordeal – in which Aweys often found himself unable to follow his own trial for linguistic reasons – he was eventually acquitted, having spent more than two years in prison. And I need hardly add that, while the AG’s office was wasting its energy and resources securing the above bogus convictions, real drug traffickers were slipping through the net like nobody’s business.
But hey! Let’s not be too hard on poor old Dr Silvio Camilleri. After all, it is not only yours truly who gets proven right every now and again. He does, too. For instance, on October 5 2008, the Attorney General made the following claim in this very newspaper: “I have always understood that in Britain, as in Malta, whether a person has committed an offence under the law, whether Maltese or British, is something to be decided by the courts of the land and not by some NGO.”
Well, no one can deny that he has now been proved 100% right (though whether he’s particularly thrilled at being thus vindicated is, of course, another matter entirely...).
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But each and every single time? I don’t know. There is, after all, only so much vindication a man can take, before he gets big-headed about it. And besides, after a while it just becomes boring. Especially when the things you are constantly proven right about should really be self-evident to anyone who possesses something called “a brain” (with or without a government licence).
