Ronnie Azzopardi ‘is-Sufu’ loses appeal against 2003 attempted murder conviction

Three judges have thrown out an appeal filed by Ronnie Azzopardi, known as is-Sufu, against his conviction for the attempted murder of his neighbour, Jonathan Spiteri in 2003, saying his actions showed that he placed little value on human life.

Spiteri had suffered a gunshot wound to the shoulder but had survived the murder attempt, ducking in the Toyota Corolla he was driving, just before he lost control of the car and crashed into a wall. The victim had played dead to avoid being shot again.

The case followed a longstanding family feud between the Azzopardis, nicknamed tas-Sufu, and the Spiteris. The two families lived in the same neighbourhood of Cospicua, known as Verdala.

Two years earlier, Jonathan Spiteri’s brother, Melchior, had killed Azzopardi’s brother, Jason, after he got to know that Azzopardi had threatened Spiteri’s mother over a debt. Melchior Spiteri was later imprisoned after being convicted of Jason Azzopardi’s murder.

The accused had attempted to avenge his brother’s death, the jury had been told.

In 2011, Azzopardi was jailed for 20 years for Spiteri’s attempted murder. He had subsequently filed an appeal.

In a decision handed down last week, the Court of Criminal Appeal, presided by judges Joseph Zammit Mackeon, Abigail Lofaro and Edwina Grima, noted that the appellant claimed the jury had been misdirected by the presiding judge and had not been correctly appraised of the rules of corroboration, amongst other things.

It also noted that after filing the appeal, he had changed his lawyer, who ended up contradicting the grounds for the appeal as laid out in the original application.

The court said that Azzopardi’s objections to the judge’s address did not deserve consideration as they were raised at too late a stage in the proceedings and weren’t mentioned in the original appeal, but in any case, the court had examined them and found that the objections did not have merit.

Another objection was that the jury trial should have been restarted with different jurors after a witness revealed that the accused had tried to kill her with a car bomb. This request had been rejected by the Criminal Court as no reference was made to ongoing judicial proceedings against the accused with regards to the bomb.

The Court of Criminal Appeal felt that the first court had given adequate direction to the jurors on how to evaluate this particular piece of evidence, rejecting this ground of appeal. The same went for the rest of the contested evidence.

Azzopardi had also complained that the punishment meted out to him was excessive, given the social and family background – his brother, Jason had been murdered by the victim’s brother Melchior Spiteri – as well as due to the delays in the conclusion of the case and the fact that the victim had only suffered slight injuries. Additionally, he said, the jury had not returned a unanimous verdict of guilt, but despite this he had been handed a punishment close to the maximum for the crime of attempted murder.

But the court dismissed this argument, saying that there were “certainly” no grounds for amending the punishment. The appellant was a relapser whose convictions stretched back to 1991, a man with a criminal character built on the social and family background he grew up in, where the resolution of disputes meant violence, said the court.

It said it “adjudged the punishment laid down by the First Court was not excessive in the particular circumstances of this case where the appellant, with clear intent, wanted to end a human life which appears to have a very low price to him.”

The court said its duty was to “reign in this attitude by imposing a prison sentence that reflects the seriousness of the consequences of this type of deviant and antisocial behaviour.”