The reason visiting fortune tellers is dangerous, is not because it is runs contrary to the teaching of Catholic religion, the Church or the law; neither is it because fortune tellers are bad people who cast voodoo spells. No, it's quite simply because once you pay a fortune teller a visit, even if you treat it as a big joke, you can never be 100 per cent certain that your conduct and actions, post-visit, were not in some way influenced or to some extent moulded and shaped.

Assuming you are told that within a year your marriage will end, and your marriage does indeed end by the time the year is up. A part of you, if you are really honest with yourself, may feel that you somehow willed the break-up subconsciously - either by making no attempt to work at your marriage, or by attempting to destroy your marriage because of the information you were privy to, or else by being so petrified of the marriage ending that you somehow drove your husband away through fear or paranoia.

Bottom line - once you go to a fortune teller, the seed is sown, free will is immediately put into doubt and compromised and that is the dangerous part. You're damned if you do and damned if you don't.

I remember August 2002 very clearly. It was one of the few times in my life that I actually sat down to watch the local news and came away feeling like I had really seen something of news value. I'm talking about the judicial scandal which rocked our world and blew us all away. It was our very own 9/11 - something we could sit back and speculate about for months and years to come. Which we all did.

We really did leave no stone unturned, and why would we? We each had our own theory as to what could have happened and why. Was it a one-off, a slip-up, an isolated incident - not so much the deliberate pursuit of criminality but rather the result of a lackadaisicalness that went too far? Or had it been happening forever unbeknownst to us all? And, more importantly, who of the two judges was 'guiltier'? Which of the two elicited more sympathy in our eyes?

I could go on and on with the speculation but it's all water under the bridge now. The jury's out (minus the jury) and the case has been more or less been put to bed, save Arrigo's right of appeal. There's been so much ink spilled that to say any more might be overkill.

I happened to be prosecuting a case in Gozo on the morning Arrigo presided over a Court of Criminal Appeal sitting - his last one as ordinary judge, just before he became Chief Justice. It was his farewell sitting in Gozo. I remember the day well because one of the more senior Gozitan lawyers gave quite a moving speech at the time. He spoke about Arrigo's career as a lawyer and then as a judge, his versatility with criminal, civil and commercial law, a rare combination to find embodied in one judge. He ended the speech on a touching note, praising Arrigo's humanity and quality of mercy, which he claimed was one of Arrigo's characteristic defining strengths which would definitely be missed on the bench.

I think what made Arrigo a very good judge was what, in the end, made him use 'bad' judgment. The life of a judge can be a lonely one inasmuch as it requires complete self-restraint, an aloofness, isolation and detachment from society where you risk being unpopular and even disliked.

Arrigo was the sort of judge who never really withdrew from society. He was incapable of wearing blinkers. He liked people and enjoyed people liking him back. He was very human and accessible. Many times, this is what made him a good judge. But, ironically, when it came to the crunch, it was what led to his downfall.

He chose to put his close friendship on a pedestal and in doing so he fell from quite a height. His strength suddenly became his weakness and what may have started off as something unconscious and unthinking, a 'venial sin' if you like, suddenly got out of hand and assumed a life of its own.

I don't think Arrigo woke up one morning, decided he needed cash and thought 'bingo, there's always bribery'. I think he suddenly found himself neck deep in something that had suddenly grown bigger than he was.

Had Mario Camilleri's case fallen on Arrigo's desk in the normal course of his duties and had he assumed the brief and examined the case without any extraneous interferences, in all likelihood Arrigo would have reduced Camilleri's prison term. That is the sad part - it's sad for many people, not least Camilleri and Arrigo.

But too many things happened in the meantime which clouded over and compromised his judgment. The underworld is like a tunnel which sucks you in and has an almost spiral effect where you lose all sense of perspective and control.

To say that justice is judgmental may sound like a truism but I find it quite curious and interesting. It's no wonder we refer to the judge's decision as a 'judgment'. In his judgment, Mr Justice Caruana Demajo makes a very interesting observation to the effect that Arrigo would never really be in a position to know whether he would have reached the exact same conclusions on the basis of the same findings and thought process had that wad of cash not been left on his desk.

And that is more or less my fortune teller theory. Once you meddle and tempt fate, you can never really know that your actions are entirely your own and not the product of someone else's convoluted mind at work.

michelaspiteri@gmail.com