An appeal filed by Nazzareno (Reno) Mercieca from a judgment given by the First Hall of the Civil Court has been dismissed by the Constitutional Court.

Mercieca, who was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment on charges of complicity in murder and of disposing of a corpse, claimed that his fundamental human right to a fair hearing was violated by both the Criminal Court and the Court of Criminal Appeal.

Mercieca had filed his constitutional application against the Prime Minister and against the Attorney General.

He claimed that he had been arraigned, together with a certain Gaetano Scerri, and both had been charged with the murder of Bertu Vella and with hiding the victim's corpse.

Both men were imprisoned for 20 years following a trial by jury. Mercieca's appeal to the Court of Criminal Appeal had been dismissed and he had then filed his constitutional application.

The First Hall of the Civil Court, in its constitutional jurisdiction, had heard Mercieca's submission that when he had testified on oath during the inquiry, his evidence had been handwritten by the magistrate and not recorded on tape.

According to Mercieca, although Magistrate Carol Peralta had correctly written down the words that Mercieca had used in his testimony, the magistrate had not used the correct punctuation and thus the sense of his testimony had been altered.

Mercieca explained to the first court that as he was unable to read he had not read his own evidence when it was recorded manually by the magistrate. When the magistrate had read his evidence out to him in court, Mercieca had not objected as he had not noticed at that stage that it did not have the same meaning he had originally intended.

In his testimony before the first court, Mercieca said that in the course of his trial by jury on murder charges, the jurors had asked to hear the tape recordings of the evidence he had given during the inquiry. It had then resulted that his evidence had not been tape recorded but had been transcribed by the presiding magistrate.

Mercieca had asked that Magistrate Peralta be called upon to testify in the trial so as to explain what Mercieca had said. But the magistrate had been overseas and was not produced as a witness by the prosecution in the trial by jury.

Mercieca claimed he had therefore not been given a fair hearing neither before the Criminal Court nor before the Court of Criminal Appeal.

The First Hall of the Civil Court dismissed Mercieca's application and found that he had sustained no violation of his fundamental human rights.

The first court pointed out that although it might be the case that the written word did not reflect the intonation used by Mercieca while testifying, the fact remained that the magistrate had read out the evidence to Mercieca, who had confirmed it.

While the magistrate was reading out the evidence, Mercieca had been in position to notice whether the intonation was different to that he had used while testifying.

Furthermore, the court found it unlikely that the magistrate would recall such a subtle matter as the use of intonation while reading out a transcript of evidence.

The first court added that it did not agree with Mercieca's submission that the only connection of the accused with the crime was the manner in which one sentence had been transcribed in the inquiry stage. Mercieca's application was thus dismissed.

Mercieca then lodged an appeal to the Constitutional Court composed of Chief Justice Vincent Degaetano, Mr Justice Joseph D. Camilleri and Mr Justice Joseph A. Filletti.

The appellate court noted that it did not result that Mercieca had ever requested the production of Magistrate Peralta as a witness until the final submissions were being made by his defence counsel to the jurors in the course of the trial.

Neither was the Constitutional Court convinced that the alleged mistake made by the magistrate when transcribing the evidence amounted to the determining factor that had led the jurors to deliver a guilty verdict in Mercieca's case.

Mercieca had not proven that the jurors' verdict was exclusively or principally based upon two sentences in his sworn statement made before the magistrate conducting the inquiry.

The court therefore dismissed Mercieca's appeal.