Magistrate rules man's detention illegal

A Georgian man, who has been in prison far longer than he was sentenced for, was released yesterday after a magistrate ruled that his incarceration was illegal.

Ladislav Mironich, 29, was jailed for 13 months on Monday after he was found guilty of stealing a laptop, two mobile phones, holding three people against their will and handling stolen property.

However, he had spent more than 17 months in preventative custody which would translate to roughly double the time he was sentenced for when jail time is taken into account.

The prison authorities, however, refused to let him go because he had filed an appeal following Monday's judgment.

Magistrate Lawrence Quintano threw out the Attorney General's argument that, according to law, if an appeal is filed, the judgment would be suspended until the appeal is decided. A person can ask for bail during that period but if he failed to offer security to guarantee he did not leave the island then he should remain in custody, the Attorney General also argued.

But the magistrate said that while a literal and grammatical reading of that law in question would give the result the Attorney General was insisting on, such an interpretation was only correct in the case of people sentenced to prison time that was longer than the period they had actually spent in preventative custody.

He said it was what the legislator had in mind when drafting the law in question. It provided a balance between the convicted persons' right to appeal and the interest of society to keep a person in check if he was running the risk of a stiff prison sentence.

He added that if Mr Mironich's appeal failed he could not be subjected to a longer prison term.

Moreover, the magistrate said it had to be considered that a final judgment by the Criminal Court of Appeal was unlikely to be pronounced very soon. In the meantime, Mr Mironich would remain in custody simply because he was trying to clear his name, he added, stressing that no appeal, even if successful, could then erase the time spent in prison.