Never mind passports. It’s now justice that’s up for sale

This week I thought long and hard about retiring from journalism altogether, and...

Hang on, what was that noise? Sounded suspiciously like the simultaneous popping of around 400,000 champagne corks in the distance... (but hey! It could just as easily have been another flock of eagles flying at low altitude over a protected bird sanctuary. You never know).

Anyway, sorry to disappoint you all, but I haven't actually taken any decision yet. So if I were you I'd keep those bottles of bubbly in the fridge just a short while longer.

Still, after reading the appeals court judgment handed down to Daniel Holmes last Thursday, it became obvious to me that the real reason for this monumental injustice (apart from the nationality of the accused, to which I shall return shortly) was the fact that the media had taken an interest in this case to begin with.

Not just our newspaper, but other media both locally and abroad: including a couple of regional newspapers in places like Cardiff and Bolton, from where Holmes and his deceased 'partner in crime' Barry Lee (who committed suicide in prison in 2008) originally hailed.

There was also a petition which attracted thousands of signatures from dozens of countries around the world... and last but not least, a letter by Daniel's father Mel, reproduced this week in the press, which highlighted a number of anomalies surrounding his son's case.

It was clear as daylight that all this attention irked the learned judges of the appeals court - David Scicluna, Joseph Zammit McKeon and Abigail Lofaro - no end... to the extent that their irritation was duly noted in the last appeal hearing (Holmes's lawyer was silenced by Zammit Mckeon when he alluded to the petition in court).

This was obvious even at the time; but what I did not expect (because part of me unreasonably retains a modicum of faith in human nature, in spite of everything) was that the same judges would allow that irritation to literally cloud their judgment.

Yet the three judges of the court of criminal appeal came down like a ton of bricks on Daniel Holmes, not because he deserved to be buried under a landslide... but as a way of imparting a very unsubtle message to the same media which the judges felt had 'interfered' with their private little party. Their message? "Stay out of our business or others will get hurt".

If this interpretation is correct - and I don't doubt it for a second: the entire ruling simply drips with this unshakable impression - then it means that I myself am partly responsible for the fate of a man who will now spend the next nine years in prison: the same prison where another man, charged with the same crime, hanged himself in 2008.

These are not thoughts one takes lightly. OK, I didn't exactly throw up at the truly revolting idea... but to tell you the truth I came close. I felt a very real shot to my stomach: a genuine wave of nausea that seriously got me thinking about whether it is ever justifiable to expose others to the risk of injustice, on the pretext that 'one is doing one's job'.

The sensation placed me in the quandary of not knowing what to do. Does one not flag an injustice because others may suffer more injustices as a result of the publicity? Or do you flag it all the same, for exactly the same reason?

What I did do was send an apology to Daniel Holmes's family. And I must say it made a big difference to me that Daniel's father took the trouble to write back, rejecting the apology and insisting I had nothing to be sorry about for having written about his son's case.

I am grateful for that because it did take a weight off my shoulders. But at the same time 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. And while I no longer feel responsible in the sense that I did something wrong, the incident also confirmed a previous suspicion that the Maltese law courts are, in fact, a spiteful, vindictive and monstrously unjust institution... form which the very last thing one can reasonably expect is justice.

Add the fact that there is evidence that the same institution is also monstrously corrupt - at least three judges (two of whom were convicted, the other hanged himself last May) are understood to have taken bribes and/or exposed themselves to 'undue influence', in a naked bid to thwart justice to the benefit of criminals - and quite frankly the only conclusion to be reached is that Malta is simply not a safe place to be a journalist who reports on justice issues.

In fact, I'd go a step further. Let's not forget that Malta is a also a country in which you can find yourself charged with drug possession even if you were never caught in possession of drugs. Malta is not a safe place to live, full stop.

OK, enough with the self-recrimination now and onto the business at hand. The problem with Thursday's ruling is not limited only to the obvious injustice inherent in the sentence... and I expect that will now be addressed by the European Court of Human Rights, which by the way is busy notching up a whole raft of cases in which our country has been found guilty of human rights infringements: mostly concerning the justice system. 

The problem with the sentence is also the message it sends out to society. I've already highlighted the message to the press - which is the equivalent of a hostage-taker pointing the gun at his victim and warning everyone to back off... but what about the message it sends out to the public at large?

Let's try and put it into perspective. Some of you might recall the case of Noel Arrigo and Patrick Vella (two judges, one of them Chief Justice at the time when the incident occurred) who were tried and convicted for accepting a bribe to reduce the sentence of a drug trafficker by four years.

As I write this, people are busy making online comparisons between the sentences in these two cases. They are quite right to be baffled: how can a man be given 10 years in jail for growing marijuana plants - when two senior judges got two and three years respectively for accepting a bribe by a drug trafficker (immediate contradiction too blatant to even bother explaining)... in the process, making a total mockery of the entire justice system, and demolishing its credibility with the wider public in a way that is probably irreversible?

To put the question another way: which of these two crimes harmed society more? The one involving growing a plant that even the University of Harvard now thinks might be able to cure cancer? Or 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 16-year sentence. What happened to the other six?

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 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.