Should jurors know during a trial of person’s criminal past?

Jurors currently cannot be told about the criminal record of the person who stands accused before them, but a judge is proposing to change this.

Mr Justice Michael Mallia yesterday asked if the time had come to study whether jurors should know the criminal past of the accused to help them in their deliberation.

The judge’s proposal was met with mixed reactions from people in the legal field.

Former European Court of Human Rights judge Giovanni Bonello agreed that previous convictions “could and must” be relevant when jurors deliberated even though the fundamental principle was that a person must always be convicted or acquitted on proved facts.

On a similar vein, Police Commissioner Peter Paul Zammit qualified his agreement with the proposal. If the defence of the accused referred to the person’s good character, it would make sense for jurors to know the criminal record, he said.

But the proposal was shot down by former judge Philip Sciberras, who last year sat on the Justice Reform Commission headed by Dr Bonello.

He insisted that the accused must always be presumed innocent before found guilty and jurors should base their verdict solely on the facts of the case.

It was a sentiment shared by criminal lawyer Joe Giglio, who noted that jurors were not given a person’s criminal record because they had no adequate legal training and risked failing to distinguish between the facts of a case and the person’s past.

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