From trial to error

That was the week, that was. What it has started will not be over for a long time to come. Among other things it triggered a grandmother of spins by the Nationalist party/government weavers. Their intention is obvious. They want to obfuscate the impact of the verdict delivered by the jury in the conspiracy case regarding the knifing of Richard Cachia Caruana, the personal assistant to Prime Minister Eddie Fenech Adami at Mdina one night in December 1994.

The intention of Dr Fenech Adami to announce an end his long tenancy of the room at the top did not come to him like a flash. It looks more likely to have been held back as a contingency provision. Had the verdict gone the way the PM hoped for and believed it should, that would have lit a blaze of glory to the timing of his announcement.

If it went the other way, as it began to look more and more likely as the trial progressed, it would be trotted out to distract and deviate attention from the collapse of that hope. And so was it trotted out, through an inspired leak. The weavers, though, entangled that spin in their own weave.

For one spin was not enough. Another quickly rushed to the Cabinet was a proposal to review the criminal process. Though no one said so outright, and the prime minister did not go on the record with his personal view, not just yet, it was clear that a cloud on the jury system was to be whipped up straightaway.

The system had been bluntly disparaged by the attorney general, in the wake of another verdict in the trial of Ian Farrugia, also concerning the knifing of Mr Cachia Caruana. The justice minister returned to the theme on Monday when The Times followed up the PM's replies to the media after that morning's Cabinet meeting. He had said he felt he should not comment about Sunday's acquittal of the accused in the conspiracy trial. But, he went on, the time had come to revise the criminal justice system.

According to the minister, Dr Tonio Borg, the jury system had collapsed in the Farrugia case. The accused had been found not guilty, despite evidence which the minister implicitly felt indicated, in the least, complicity. Dr Borg was careful to balance his comments, but his words made it easy to conclude that the jury system was a major area to be targeted in the review of the criminal justice system, which had shot to the top of Monday's Cabinet agenda.

A person's office is as big as the dignity the occupier endows it with. The Cabinet's reaction to Sunday's verdict has not raised that of its members any higher. There is no evidence that the origin of denigration of trial by jury as justice dispensed by housewives can be traced to the Cabinet. But there is no other source to go to for the evident displeasure with the verdict.

The outcome was important for the Cabinet as a whole - it had granted immunity to a man who among other things claimed to have accepted the contract to eliminate Richard Cachia Caruana. It was exceptionally crucial to Dr Fenech Adami personally - he had taken it upon himself to talk directly to the contracted man and to offer sweeping immunity which, to boot, that person scorned away as not having been made at his suggestion.

What could diminish the PM is not the fact that the jury, on the basis of the case argued so strongly by the prosecution with the evidence it could muster, the words and bearing of the witnesses, and the counter-arguments of the defence, rejected the assumptions that impelled him to press for immunity to the person on whom the prosecution based its cases.

The prime minister is entitled to insist that he was convinced in conscience by what that person told him. As it has turned out so far, on Wednesday he went beyond that. Reacting to the attack trundled at him by Dr Alfred Sant, the Leader of the Opposition, on Tuesday, Dr Fenech Adami chose to compete with Dr Sant, who had declared he believed Meinrad Calleja in the restricted context of his denials regarding conspiracy accusations. The PM declared there was nothing to indicate that Joseph Fenech, the beneficiary of the extension of immunity, had not told the truth (upon which the immunity was conditional). No one has shown that he has, either. Two juries had enough reservations to reject that particular version of the truth, a concept that troubled Pontius Pilate so.

What no one is entitled to imply, in a manner that smacks of unbecoming arrogance, is that he holds the one sacred truth. That all others who do not agree with him are wrong. In the jury system those 'all others' - the people, in the personalised significance of American legal jargon - are represented by the individuals called upon to serve as jurors.

They do not ask to be selected. Most wish they were not and many try to be excluded. Our legal system, based on the right for an accused to be tried by his peers, other than where he can opt to plead to a judge, without a jury, imposes an obligation on citizens to serve as jurors, if called upon.

Those who are so called would be held in contempt of the court if they stayed away without a valid excuse. The call to them includes a clear warning to that effect by the judge appointed to preside.

Nor is the selection of jurors a haphazard exercise, taken lightly by the prosecution or the defence. It is crucial to both that they ferret out and reject anybody who they feel might have any bias. The prosecution, no less than the defence, would have seen to that in the conspiracy case.

Once selected jurors bear the terrible responsibility of judging an equal - a fellow member of that mysterious collectivity called 'the people'. It is not uncommon that a presiding judge, in recognition of the weight imposed on the jury in a particularly difficult trial, exempts its members from further service.

It is this system that the prime minister and his cabinet now query and implicitly rejects. The prime minister and his Cabinet equals are under no compunction to praise the jury system. Nor are they at liberty to impugn it because it goes against their conclusions and expectations.

Before implicitly derogatory views on the jury system are expressed one should have the decency to let the dust settle on current hot cases, to express opinions in an abstract - rather than an immediately judgmental-context. That applies particularly to the prime minister. Even if in his last lap he remains the chief executive officer of the nation's administration.

He should come to feel that a review of ongoing systems is required through an ongoing process - without accelerating that process because a jury has not upheld his personal view of a highly charged matter.

Those who choose to indulge in stated or understated controversy about the outcome of any particular trial might find the time to underline a distinction that is all too often forgotten. The courts of justice do not necessarily and invariably dispense justice, although injustice could come from within them.

The courts are part of a legal process. Justice and legality are not Siamese twins. They may not necessarily be related. Certainly, not in outcome. Judges as well as jurors have been known to find not guilty accused whose heavy guilt would always remain a millstone on their soul, if not their conscience.

They have been known to find guilty and to condemn the innocent, who would only find justice from their Maker.

Fine morality aside, one tends to agree or disagree with a verdict depending on which side of subjectivity one sits.

The Cabinet's reaction to the complicity verdict and the PM's comments in reply to the Opposition Leader, who waded in instead of letting the facts of the trial have their say, were out of place.

The prime minister's disappointment was to be expected. He had his personal judgment riding on the verdict. That he clearly did not agree with the verdict only confirms that he is as subjective as those of us who agree or disagree with whatever decision others take.

Because he is the prime minister, he can initiate system reviews. What he ought not to do is take action other than in the clearly defined interest of the people.

His rush to take such action almost the moment the verdict was delivered mires his objectivity in doubt.

I set down my first appraisal and comments regarding the follow-up to the conspiracy trial while away from Malta, its heat and its rumours. My views, as middling or as bad any other person's, are not based on or inspired by any personal knowledge of the characters in the ten-year-old drama.

I have never met either Meinrad Calleja or Joseph Fenech, and have no desire to change that. I have run into Richard Cachia Caruana about three times, and we spoke briefly and civilly to each other, years after the Mdina knifing. Though I had never met him at the time, I was shocked by the attempt on his life, and understood Eddie Fenech Adami's grief when, soon after, we chanced to be entering the House of Representatives at the same time.

I have my own theory regarding what happened in Mdina, that fateful dark night. In it I subscribe to neither the Opposition Leader's belief of Mr Calleja's version, nor that of the Prime Minister's regarding Mr Fenech's. But my conjecture is meaningless.

The only fact clear to me is the brutal, definite intent to murder a human being. I hope that, whoever was in any way involved, for whatever reason, get their just desserts. And that they do so in their lifetime, not just in the inevitable beyond. Spin and polemic will not contribute to that end.