There are many things and reasons why our judicial system is up to its neck in a colossal mess. One of them is because we keep burdening it with useless and victimless cases that should be thrown out before they reach the first step of our law courts.

If you walk into any court room, on any given day, all you’ll see is chaos, people tearing their hair out in despair or boredom, and lawyers rushing from one room to another with very little reverence towards the crucifix-kissing ritual that our whole judicial system is supposedly based on.

If you’re ever unlucky enough to get enthralled in a legal battle, there’s a high chance that you won’t live long enough to see the end of it.

And yet, despite this very sad situation that has been the status quo for as long as I can remember, we seem hell-bent to want to waste more of the courts’ time with silly cases and the persecution of victimless crimes.

The latest one that caught my eye was about a Fillipino woman whom the police accused of bigamy.

They dragged her to court based on an anonymous tip and after two years failed to provide the evidence and lost.

Evangeline Cauchi (57) has been happily married to Ronald Cauchi for over ten years. Before getting married to Ronald Cauchi, Evangeline had presented a death certificate to prove that her first husband, Francisco C. Hernandez, had died of a heart attack back in 2002.

Almost eight years later the public registry received an anonymous letter stating that Evangeline’s first husband was actually still alive. All hell broke loose because, let’s face it, we can’t possibly have a bigamist living happily in our country, even if she’s not bothering anyone, and just living her life with her new husband.

To cut a long story short, after dragging Evangeline to court, after causing unimaginable hassles in her family, the police failed to present good enough evidence to prove that her first husband was in fact still alive. They couldn’t even prove that she had forged the death certificate or that she knew that he was still alive when she married Ronald Cauchi.

After two years the case was finally thrown out. That’s more than 700 days of processing, and only God knows at what financial and human cost.

Now I know that this might not be what the law states (at least not to the letter), but when no one is being hurt, when there’s no victim in a crime, when there’s no justice to be served, shouldn’t our prosecutors conjure up whatever small dose of common sense that they can, and apply it?

But maybe this is just too much to ask.