Child abuse good, marijuana bad

It is a truth universally acknowledged (also a matter of practical common sense) that the severity of any given court sentence will also be a reflection of how seriously the country's legal system views the crime in question.

So when the law-courts sentence a man to 12 years behind bars for growing a marijuana plant on his own property... and then goes on to sentence another man to only 10 years for serially raping his own three daughters, aged between 11 and 12... one is left with literally no option but to conclude that the Maltese judicial system views the cultivation of cannabis as more serious a crime than serial, violent child abuse.

I don't know about you, but I am not comfortable with the implications of the above discrepancy. I am not comfortable knowing that the people who mete out justice (or are supposed to, anyway) in this country cannot tell the difference between smoking a mildly mind-altering plant, and subjecting your three prepubescent daughters to sustained physical and psychological abuse that will certainly scar them for life, and most likely render them incapable of experiencing any fulfilling long-term relationships in future.

Seriously, folks. If a judge or magistrate cannot distinguish between the severity of these two vastly dissimilar crimes, to the extent that they hand down the harsher sentence for the manifestly less serious offence... then quite frankly, what business do they have to be judging people at all?

Nor is it just the judiciary that has questions to answer. Parliament is just as guilty, for passing laws which are often just a glorified election of the collective ignorance of its own members. This merely allows individual judges and magistrates to claim that their hands are tied: they can only apply existing legislation, and it is the legislation that is flawed... not their own interpretation thereof. But does this justify our law-courts' often outrageously nonsensical sentencing policy? I think not.

As I write, a 57-year-old woman is about to be released from prison (only thanks to a Presidential pardon) after having been put there for failing to force her 17-year-old son to visit his father, when the boy had absolutely no intention of doing so.

Ah yes, the ultimate crime. Yet there I was, thinking that it was already virtually impossible to get a 17-year-old-boy to do anything at all if he had set his mind against it - anything from finishing what's on his plate, to coming home earlier than 2am on a Friday night. So how, exactly, was this woman expected to convince her son to visit his father, when he obviously didn't want to go? What sort of superhuman powers did the court expect her to invoke, in order to achieve what practically every mother I have ever met has always insisted is a physical impossibility?

But what I find revealing about this case is that the prison sentence itself was not the result of some random, creative adjudicating by an over-eager magistrate who was afterwards overruled. Oh no: the mother filed an appeal against the original sentence... but the original sentence was upheld by what is arguably the highest legal authority on the island.

This means that Malta's entire legal system is actually of the view that imprisoning the mother was the correct thing to do: a fact which places Malta's legal system directly at odds with the rest of the country whose interests it is supposed to serve. And let's face it: it cannot be healthy, to have the entire nation inhabiting one universe, while the members of its judiciary evidently inhabit a totally different universe, complete with its own unique (and often incomprehensible) value system.

Coming back to that other discrepancy I mentioned earlier. By handing down a lengthier prison sentence for a cannabis cultivation charge, than for aggravated child abuse (and incest, by the way) on multiple victims... the law-courts did not merely give us a ext-book illustration of that logical absurdity we otherwise refer to as the 'Criminal Code'. They also showed themselves up to be a bunch of country bumpkins who have no idea what's happening out there in the real world.

Truth be told, the 12-year sentence handed down to Daniel Holmes for marijuana cultivation would constitute a blatant and obvious miscarriage of justice... even if marijuana really was the potentially life-threatening drug some people evidently still think it is. But if our judges and magistrates actually kept themselves abreast of the latest medical and scientific opinions in the matters that tey afterwards rule upon, they would know that... it isn't.

For the purposes of this article I will limit myself only to the latest out of dozens of peer-reviewed scientific papers, which came out today (Monday 15 October). According to a report by the UK Drug Policy Commission - which includes the former head of the British Medical Research Council, Prof. Colin Blakemore, former chief inspector of constabulary, David Blakey, as well as Prof. John Strang, head of the National Addictions Centre, Prof. Alan Maynard, a specialist in health economics, and Lady Ilora Finlay, a past president of the Royal Society of Medicine - smoking marijuana is no more harmful than eating junk food.

The UKDPC report concludes with a recommendation to "[review] sentencing practice so that those caught growing below a specified low volume of cannabis plants faced no, or only minimal, sanctions."

It also says that "imposing minimal or no sanctions on those growing cannabis for personal use could go some way to undermining the burgeoning illicit cannabis factories controlled by organised crime."

Yet here in Malta, if you're done for growing a plant which is about as dangerous as a Big Mac with large fries and a coke, you are treated as a more reprehensible criminal than a serial child rapist. And I somehow doubt I'm the only one who sees this as an overwhelming insult to the entire country's intelligence.