The Court of Criminal Appeal has commuted a four-month prison term, handed down to a police sergeant found guilty of assaulting a woman in her car in May 2007, to a one-year suspended sentence, after taking into account the clean criminal record of the accused.
Police sergeant David Sant, 47 from Sliema, had been caught on camera violently kneeing a 58-year-old French woman, Catherine Sophie Pernod Sprangers, in the chest and neck during an altercation in a busy St Julian’s street.
The incident was brought to public attention only after stills of the video were published in MaltaToday Midweek on 6 June 2007.
In a 14-page ruling handed down on Monday, Chief Justice Vincent De Gaetano effectively overturned all eight of the defence lawyers’ points of appeal, upholding the Magistrate Court’s previous ruling that the assault in question constituted a “serious offence punishable by imprisonment.”
“If it weren’t for the newspaper MaltaToday, this crime would not have surfaced,” Chief Justice DeGaetano pointed out in his sentence. “This Court believes that if such crimes, committed by police officers, are not treated with the seriousness and severity that they warrant, then society – especially a small society like ours, in which everyone knows everyone else – could easily slide into regression, so that even more serious aberrations may end up as the rule rather than the exception, thereby escaping punishment.”
However, the judge also felt he could not ignore an otherwise impeccable record of 20 years’ service to the Police Force. With the exception of a single previous minor conviction (Sant was fined Lm2 for smoking in a cinema in 1978), the Court considered Sant’s criminal record to be clean. Describing his behaviour in the Sprangers incident as “totally out of character”, and taking into consideration personal problems the police sergeant may have been going through at the time, De Gaetano decided to suspend the four-month sentence for a period of one year.
De Gaetano’s ruling also dwelt at length on the admissibility of otherwise of video evidence in court. Significantly, the Appeals Court held that a video, photograph or tape-recording may be used as evidence even if the source of the evidence remains unclear: a ruling which may bring to bear on future cases where evidence takes the form of video footage.
In his judgment, DeGaetano also rejected the defence’s claim that no charges could be brought against Sant once the victim of the crime herself did not file a criminal report. The Chief Justice observed that given the nature of the case, and given also that Sprangers had not expressly renounced her intention to take action within four days of the crime, the police were justified in proceeding ex officio against the accused.
In actual fact, Sprangers testified last June that she had tried to file a report at the St Julian’s police station on three separate occasions after the incident, only to be told that there was no one to handle her complaint.
Strangely, some media reports of the original court case omitted to mention this part of her testimony, choosing instead to highlight the fact that the police sergeant had prevented a young woman from committing suicide a day before.