Where justice is a game…

There is a line in a famous Bob Dylan song, ‘The Hurricane’, about the conviction of middleweight boxing champion Rubin Carter on trumped-up murder charges in 1967 (and again in 1976) – which goes something like:

“To see him [Carter] obviously framed / couldn’t help but make me feel ashamed / to / live in a land / where justice is a gaaaaa-aaame!”

That’s how I remember it, anyway. Only, there were probably a lot more “a’s” in the “game” part. Dylan has a habit of singing the last line of each verse as though he’d just accidentally stabbed himself in the testicles with a toothpick. That’s why so few professional singers have ever really bothered with the Dylan testicle-stabbing technique. Like love, taxes, and Sai Mizzi’s salary… “it hurts”.

Meanwhile, for those who don’t know the rest of the story, Rubin Carter died last April, after spending 20 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. I won’t bother with the details – listen to Dylan’s ‘The Hurricane’: not only is it a great song, but it also contains as much detail as the Wikipedia entry anyway – because there is only one aspect of Carter’s story that I find particularly relevant to what’s going on in Malta right now. When justice is turned into a game, it is invariably innocent people who suffer.

This week we got a rare glimpse of how this game is actually played out here in Malta. No frame-ups involved this time – here is where the Hurricane analogy breaks down – but seeing it in practice still induces (in me, at any rate) the same overall sentiment Dylan expressed upon watching his own country’s justice system at work almost 50 years ago.

In the year and a half since the Labour Party won the Pangalactic General Election in March, 2013 – thus becoming the undisputed sole ruler of the entire universe (including little Malta here) – six vacancies have arisen on the judicial bench. Not much to report about the first five… or, should I say, not much has been reported about the first five… but the sixth seems to have caused a deep disturbance in the Force.

When I investigated the source of this disturbance on behalf of the Jedi Council, it transpired that Wenzu Mintoff had been appointed to the Bench.

Wenzu Mintoff. Now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a lo…o…ong time...

Interestingly enough, however, the last time I heard it the connotations were slightly different. Long before Wenzu Mintoff automatically crossed over to the Dark Side by accepting any form of nomination to any public post from the Evil Empire, most lawyers I know (and most lawyers I know are overwhelmingly Nationalist) actually held him in pretty high regard. They seemed to think he knew a lot more than they did about constitutional law. So much so that “Ask Wenzu” (sounds a bit like a radio show title, I know) was the standard response you’d almost expect when asking lawyers for explanations on the constitutional implications of this or that legal/political situation.

From the few times I actually ‘asked Wenzu’ I could also see that he does possess the encyclopaedic legal mind required to become a walking, talking, ‘Wiki-Mintoff’ of the constitution. But whether encyclopaedic minds and in-depth legal expertise suffice to make a good judge… oh, I won’t be the judge of that.

I imagine one would also need an inherent sense of fairness, the ability to think beyond bias, to have an in-depth understanding of human nature, and to be experienced enough in that wild, uncharted territory called “Life” to make accurate, clinical and humane assessments of all sorts of situations.

And for all I know, Wenzu Mintoff might possess all those qualities in great abundance, and more beside. Heck, he may even have X-ray vision, and the ability to raise sunken spaceships from swamps on the distant planet Dagobah (you’ll never guess which films I’ve been watching again, by the way). It’s not really the point.

Wenzu Mintoff is also a former Labour Party MP. He is a co-founder and former chairperson of another political party, Alternattiva Demokratika. For years he was editor of the Labour Party newspaper KullHadd. In fact there is hardly a line in his CV that does not somewhere, somehow, involve some form of political involvement on the national snakes and ladders board.

Looking back on some of those rises and falls is something of a game unto itself. As I remember it (but alas! I was but a youngling then) Mintoff was one of only two Labour MPs of the Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici era to stand up to the corruption of that regime. He was expelled from the party as a result, and (briefly) lionised by the Opposition. That was, however, in another galaxy, long long ago. The times they have a-changed, political exigencies they have a-changed with them; and there is literally no saying how the incessant yo-yoing between ‘hero’ or ‘villain’ will pan out in the end. There never is.

In fact, using my own, modest knowledge of the Force I can easily predict a scenario where Wenzu Mintoff may suddenly cease to be a Sith Lord in the eyes of the Rebellion, and once again becomes a Jedi in shining armour... just by delivering a court ruling in favour of the Nationalist Party and against the government, on a pivotal point of political controversy.

And that, in itself, might explain (and justify) a widespread reaction of grim foreboding to Wenzu Mintoff’s appointment to the bench this week. It’s not a reflection on his character or even political reputation. He can be as political as he likes (or indeed, as everyone else: myself included) in any other guise. And he can be as brilliant a judge as he likes, too. Even if the Force is indeed particularly strong in young(ish) Wenzu, and he turns out to be by light-years the best judge ever to sit on the Jedi Council – his nomination, for all the above reasons, will never be seen as anything but a political manoeuvre. It is just another phase of play, in a country where justice is very clearly a “gaaaa-aaame”.

As for the rules of this game (sorry, but there is a limit to how many times you can stab your own testicle) these are based precisely on perception. Already there is an almost palpable feeling that all is not exactly hunky dory in the distribution of justice in our country. There have been bribery scandals. Endless delays. There are even European Court of Human Rights rulings condemning the disparity of justice meted out for comparable crimes, on top of mountains of anomalies in the prosecution department. Hard to see how things could get any worse from a public relations point of view, really… until, of course, they go and throw a Christmas party in a courtroom.

So, like it or not, when a vacancy arises to appoint a judge – in a country where judges are few, the case-load is gargantuan, and the law courts already suffer from a reputation for occasional political bias here and there – the choice will invariably be interpreted (rightly or wrongly) along political lines.

More worryingly the same thought-process inevitably extends also to his work as a judge. Mintoff is now under pressure to prove (Joseph Muscat even told us to ‘judge him on his performance’) that he is politically unbiased. Doesn’t that automatically create an à priori tendency to go overboard in the opposite direction? Maybe Mintoff is up to the task of putting aside such considerations when delivering judgment. Maybe not. Either way, it is the perception that counts. And in this case, the perception is: regardless of his own qualities, he was still put there for all the wrong reasons.

Then, as usual, there’s the same old bleating response to any or all criticism along the lines of… yes, but YOU (that would be the Nationalists, folks. The rest of us don’t exist, remember?) did exactly the same thing in the 25 years you were in power. And out comes trotting the list of PN-appointed judges and magistrates, with their individual links to the PN tattooed on their foreheads.

That, I suppose, was exactly what Dylan was squawking about when he sang about justice being… ooh, that was close… a game. By making such an overtly political choice to counterbalance earlier, equally overt political choices, all that has been achieved is the perpetuation of an endless session of musical chairs. And this compounds the existing impression that… forget fairness, insight, integrity, etc. The only thing that matters in appointing a judge is whether the nominee is one of ‘us’ or ‘them’. In this case, whether Labour gets a little closer to equilibrating the see-saw so that the balance no longer tips so obviously in the Nationalists’ favour (as it undeniably has in recent years). In time, when more vacancies arise, it may even get to tilt the other way. Bingo! Everybody happy. Right, kids?

Um, not exactly, no. For one thing, ‘political interference in the system’ was one of the things the Labour Party manifesto very specifically pledged to discontinue. For another: the only possible conclusion to be drawn is that political parties still consider the law courts to be an extension of their own private battlefield. This in turn overlooks the fact that the same political parties are also subject to the law – though you’d never guess just by watching them in action – and may therefore find themselves facing proceedings before the same judges they themselves appointed, specifically to tilt the balance of justice in their favour. Where’s the justice in that? And besides: how can the public have any confidence in the justice system, when its government practically confirms that the judiciary is part of its own extended structure?

The most crucial question, however, remains this: who pays the price, when public perceptions of the judiciary plumb such depths that not an iota of trust remains in the system at all? I suspect it will be the people who need that system the most. The ones who have proceedings in court – criminal, civil, commercial – and who depend on a just and fair ruling for their life or livelihood… but who have every reason to doubt they’ll get it in the end.

Maybe they won’t get it because they don’t deserve it, naturally. Maybe they will experience a miscarriage of justice. Who knows? It’s not important either way, because when you lose trust in the system, you will automatically doubt the verdict whatever it is. People will always look for subliminal reasons to believe they’ve been cheated out of their rights. Such reasons already exist aplenty, so… why not just create some more? Yes, that’ll do nicely. I didn’t lose my case because I was guilty as crap. Oh, no. I lost it because the politically-appointed judge (doesn’t matter which) found out I’m a Nationalist, or a Labourite, or that I didn’t vote in the last election…

And on it goes…just like that ancient Indian Cree prophecy: only after the last vestige of trust has evaporated, the last pillar of the separation of powers has been eroded, and the last public post has been filled with a former party activist… only then will you find that you just can’t swallow the Labour Party manifesto.