A court yesterday ruled that three policemen and a bouncer had been illegally charged twice for the same offence and cleared them of holding a French student against his will in 2009.
In April the men had been acquitted of this crime on a technicality after it emerged that the prosecution had charged them with committing the crime at the wrong time.
In July they were charged again and the prosecution amended the time. However, the court yesterday ruled this was a case of double jeopardy as the law prohibited a person from being tried twice over the same crime.
The case dates back to October 2009 when police officers Ramon Mifsud Grech, 41, from Birkirkara, Jean Paul Vella, 24, from St Julian’s and Brian Tonna, 31, from Ħamrun, and bouncer Jonathan Micallef, 29, from Birkirkara, were accused of beating French student Jean-Oliver Mesrine at Escobar in Paceville.
They were also charged with holding him against his will and damaging his camera. Mr Mesrine had claimed that he was beaten after he took photos of the three policemen drinking at the bar. He said they smashed his camera.
In the original case the men were charged with committing the crime at 11pm when evidence all showed that the alleged incident took place at 3am. This led to the men being acquitted in April.
The release of the three policemen because of the error had caused a public outcry, with Justice Minister Chris Said calling for an investigation and President George Abela saying those found to have made the mistake should shoulder responsibility for it.
The public was particularly irate as it came in the wake of another mistake which let a former priest off the hook on a child rape charge. That time the error was in relation to the place where the alleged crime had occurred.
A few months after the judgment, the four accused were charged again over the same incident, but the time was amended to 3am.
During the second arraignment they were not charged with beating the student but only with holding him against his will and damaging the camera.
Their defence team immediately argued that this was a case of double jeopardy but the prosecution argued that the second case was regarding a separate incident since the time was different.
Magistrate Neville Camilleri examined case law and pointed out that this was clearly a matter of the same case.
If the same evidence could be produced to back the prosecution’s charges, as happened in this case, then it was a clear case of double jeopardy. For this reason, he cleared the four men of the charges.
Double jeopardy is known in legal jargon as the ne bis in idem principle – that no one who had already faced criminal proceedings can face a fresh criminal case over the same crime.
Lawyers Manwel Mallia, Arthur Azzopardi, Peter Fenech, Giannella de Marco, Gianluca Caruana Curran and Larry Gauci appeared for the accused.