Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/204636
21 Opinion maltatoday, SUNDAY, 3 NOVEMBER 2013 poisoning public perceptions of the entire criminal justice system, by reducing the entire administration of justice in this country to a case of who can bribe which judge with what? (Note: if it's not money, it's free meals at a restaurant. The cost of influencing justice in this country seems to constantly get cheaper as time wears on). But I won't expand any further on the comparison between the two cases. The trouble here is that penalties are stipulated at law, and laws are drawn up by politicians who are elected for all the wrong reasons. So in the judges' case, there was little or no leeway available to the courts. There was however plenty of leeway in Holmes' case… and this only makes the comparison all the more poignant. Besides, there is a detail that everyone seems to have been overlooked. The drug trafficker in the judges' case was Mario Camilleri: who has since been brutally murdered, together with his son, in a vendetta/execution-style murder one would normally associate with organised crime. When this shockingly violent crime was first reported, one of the first things that crossed my mind was… hang on, what was he doing out of jail? Wasn't the whole point of the judges' scandal that his sentence should not have been reduced? And if it wasn't reduced… well, shouldn't he have been serving his sentence in Kordin, at the time when he was murdered in Qajjenza? Well, this is from a court report published in 2007: "Mr Camilleri was recently released from prison after completing a prison sentence. In June 1997, he was arrested after being found in possession of cocaine, for which he was jailed for 16 years and fined Lm25,000 in June 2001..." Great, so that explains everything, right? Camilleri was jailed for 16 years in 2001: so naturally, he was released upon completing that sentence... in 2007. Excuse me, but... how did a 16-year sentence suddenly become only six years? Was it a misprint in the original story? And if so... well, that would mean Camilleri only got six years for cocaine, while Holmes got almost double that for smoke. How can that possible make sense? Hang on, wait... OK, it is possible that Camilleri may have spent a few years in preventive custody, which then got subtracted from his sentence. And for argument's sake, let's assume he spent the entire duration (i.e., from 1997 onwards) behind bars. Even so, that means Camilleri actually served 10 years out of a 16year sentence. What happened to the other six? PHOTOGRAPHY BY RAY ATTARD now justice that's up for sale Daniel Holmes's wife Marizena with their daughter Please don't tell me that the reduction in sentence on appeal – for which he had paid a bribe, remember? – was allowed to stand, regardless of the fact that a crime had been committed in the process of acquiring it. If so, it would be worse than ludicrous. It would be utterly insane, Either way, I think the general public is owed an explanation. Don't you? Now let's look at some other cases and see if the courts used the same yardstick as in the case of Daniel Holmes. I found this one particularly revealing. Here is how it was reported in 2010: "A man found in possession of ecstasy, cannabis and LSD, has been jailed for six months and fined €468 after he admitted to police that he used the drugs… Simon Deguara, 31, of Naxxar was arrested after the police followed a tip-off and searched his Ford Fiesta in August 2005. They found a bag of ecstasy pills, three portions [sic] of the drug LSD and some small pieces of cannabis resin. "Magistrate Lawrence Quintano found him guilty based on testimony of police officers who took part in the search and that of Mark Anthony Morales, who said he had bought cannabis from the accused." Lawrence Quintano is the same I cannot ignore the implications of the entire case: i.e., that the judiciary has grown so inhumane that they will destroy a man's life (and a woman's, and a baby's) just to apply pressure on the media to shut us up magistrate who originally sentenced Holmes to 10 years over marijuana cultivation. In this case, however he sentenced a (Maltese) man to SIX MONTHS after finding him guilty of SELLING cannabis (complete with evidence in the form of a witness… something which was lacking in the Holmes conviction), as well as possession of other drugs including ecstasy. To date we don't know how many ecstasy pills were in this bag. It could have been 10. It could have been 25. It could have been 1,000, or much more. We just don't know. It seems that the precise details of drug charges are no longer all that important, when the suspect is not foreign but Maltese. And again, I think we are owed an explanation. How can one and the same magistrate apply such wildly disparate sentencing policies in two separate drug trafficking charges? How can Quintano justify sentencing a convicted Maltese trafficker to six months… and then go on to hand down 10 years to a foreign man similarly accused of trafficking… even if in this case there was no evidence that he had sold any drugs? There is no doubt in my mind – none whatsoever – that the nationality of the accused was a determining factor in the sentences, both at first instance and on appeal. Make no mistake: there is something very, very nasty and dangerous lurking beneath the already decrepit public facade of the Malta law courts. It doesn't surprise me for a second that people are now openly asking themselves if Daniel Holmes would be back home with his wife and daughter in the UK… if only he did what others have obviously done, and just bought his way out of jail.