Daniel Holmes

A cannabis cultivator is expected to appeal a constitutional court judgment that awarded him €7,000 compensation for a lengthy criminal process, something his father found “insulting”.

Daniel Holmes, a Welshman, is serving a 10-and-a-half-year jail term over cannabis cultivation in his Gozo flat in June 2006.

Last week, a constitutional court, presided over by Mr Justice Anthony Ellul, awarded him compensation after ruling that criminal proceedings against him took an unreasonable amount of time.

He was arraigned in June 2006 after the police had found him in possession of just over a kilo of dried cannabis and 0.24 grams of resin with a total value of €11,694. He was growing cannabis in one of the rooms of his Għajnsielem apartment.

He was sentenced in November 2011 and this was confirmed on appeal last year.

As he analysed these dates and the number of times the case was put off without a reason in the acts of the case, Mr Justice Ellul said the “excessive court delays” were “intolerable”, especially for the compilation of evidence to take seven years to be concluded.

The court also upheld his claim that he had been exposed to arbitrary punishment and received a tougher sentence than others who had larger quantities of drugs.

These two points infuriated the Holmes family. Mr Holmes’ father, Mel, told The Sunday Times of Malta they found the judgment insulting and were planning to appeal it.

“Despite finding that criminal proceedings had taken too long and that he had been exposed to arbitrary punishment, his jail term was not modified. The excuse given was that Daniel had pleaded guilty,” Mr Holmes said.

He also explained that even if they had no objection to the constitutional court decision, the judgment had to be appealed anyway so that the case could continue its way to the European courts.

To end up before the European courts, a case would have had to first exhaust all possible procedures in the country. Mr Holmes insisted his son only pleaded guilty to the crime because of “wrong advice” by the lawyer who represented him at the time, who, like them, expected the court to see through the lack of evidence.

The subjection to arbitrary punishment, which Mr Justice Ellul found “unconstitutional”, had not been changed. This left the parameters of punishment very wide, ranging from six months to life in prison.

“The Attorney General’s freedom to arbitrarily choose a sentence range for the crime has similarly been declared unconstitutional by Europe, but has not yet been changed. In spite of this, no modification in Daniel’s sentence was made. The judge even ignored the fact that Daniel was given no access to a lawyer during his initial interrogation,” Mr Holmes said.

He said the family, through their lawyers Franco Debono and Michaela Spiteri, is pursuing various avenues for the appeal and is also preparing its case once it reaches Europe.