Last Sunday this newspaper indicated editorially that the facts which the ongoing Consuelo Scerri Herrera case throws up may yet make the magistrate's position as untenable as that of former Police Commissioner George Grech. In my view the manner in which Scerri Herrera has carried herself since the court case started, both inside and outside the courtroom, already makes this statement accurate.

The first allegation the magistrate is countering in court is that she displayed undue familiarity towards several members of the police force. Specific reference was made to her behaviour during a lunch in a Valletta restaurant in which drinks were sent to her by two policemen seated elsewhere in the restaurant.

She remembered the lunch and acknowledged under oath that drinks were in fact sent to her but claimed there was nothing wrong in it because, contrary to what was alleged, neither of them was 'sleazy'.

Indeed, she said, one of them was the then head of the vice squad, Michael Cassar. The latter furiously and swiftly denied her testimony and wrote to the Chief Justice to point out that he had never sent drinks to any magistrate in any restaurant.

Clearly, he had understood a point that Scerri Herrera appears not to appreciate: Magistrates should not have intimate friendships with policemen nor even accept drinks from them, because they regularly appear as prosecutors before them. Indeed, when Scerri Herrera made her complaint against her accuser, Daphne Caruana Galizia, it was the police who prosecuted the latter and did so in a magistrate's court.

Cassar's denial was quickly followed by yet another one. This time it was the Chief Justice and the other members of the Commission for the Administration of Justice.

They felt that the magistrate had - at least as reported in the press - wrongly suggested during her testimony that she had been cleared of impropriety in the conduct of her financial affairs, a case relating to a property development in Lija. To add to her troubles, the magistrate now faces the claim that during her case she said something that turned out not to be true - twice - under oath.

It has further been alleged by Caruana Galizia that, in November 2007, Scerri Herrera acquitted the brother of a man she was having an illicit affair with from the crimes he was accused of. Had she been married to the man, Robert Musumeci, she would have been obliged to abstain from hearing his brother's case, for reasons of transparency.

Yet the rule does not just apply to close relatives of the spouses of judges and magistrates. Indeed, they are pointedly directed (art 23 of their code of ethics) to avoid any circumstance that can reasonably be interpreted as prejudicial to a fair hearing.

Months after the acquittal the magistrate left her husband and went on to live with Musumeci. The very serious implication here is that the magistrate abused her position to favour the brother of her lover. All she had to do to quash the allegation was to immediately declare that at the time she was not involved with Musumeci and therefore there was no threat to a fair trial. She did not. Then the case began, she took the stand and again coolly ignored the claim that justice had been corrupted. Her silence does not suggest a willingness to tell the truth. Rather, it invites the comment that she is simply trying to avoid being contradicted for a third time.

The events above, and the one that follows, consolidated my view that Scerri Herrera should no longer form part of our judiciary. She recently attended a lunch with a Nationalist MP, Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando. She is hearing a case that he is a defendant in, while he may be called to judge her if any of these events lead to a vote on her impeachment in parliament.

How reassuring, for those who believe that people at the top openly scratch each others' back.

This case has made us reflect deeply on our institutions, especially the press and the judiciary.

Like several others, I too have misgivings about the language used to make some of the allegations but bringing them to the fore required courage and was undoubtedly in the public interest.

In any event, people who dislike the style of a controversial journalist can largely ignore his or her articles. The judiciary, on the other hand, cannot be similarly avoided and we are bound by the judgments of even a discredited magistrate... unless that magistrate resigns.