Court annuls woman’s abortion conviction, sends case back for judgment
The woman had initially been handed an 18-month suspended sentence
An appeals court has annulled a conviction for a woman who carried out an abortion in 2024, finding that the initial judgment was procedurally flawed.
Earlier this year, the woman was handed an 18-month sentence suspended for three years, after a court found her guilty of having an abortion in January 2024.
The woman had turned to Mater Dei for treatment when experiencing heavy bleeding, allegedly telling medics she had taken medicine to terminate her pregnancy.
A doctor filed a police report on the case, following the advice of Mater Dei’s legal department.
The doctor later testified that the woman had been pregnant but he could not say how the pregnancy was terminated.
When questioned by police, the woman denied taking the pills, saying she was unaware that she was pregnant in the first place. She said she had fallen while on a skiing holiday, resulting in a miscarriage.
However, the court had ruled that the defence had not presented evidence to show that the miscarriage was due to natural causes, handing down a guilty verdict.
Initial judgment annulled
On Wednesday, an appeals court scrapped the initial judgment, sending the case back to the court of magistrates.
In its appeal, the defence argued that the original judgment was primarily based on hearsay and unreliable evidence, with the prosecution relying on second-hand accounts of events.
Rather than presenting first-hand evidence, the prosecution had relied on “inferior evidence to plug fundamental gaps in its case,” the defence argued.
Ultimately, the defence said, the court’s initial decision was based on “inferences built on incomplete evidence”.
On Wednesday, judge Consuelo Scerri Herrera said the first court had not clearly stated the legal provision under which the woman was being convicted, with Maltese law listing a person carrying out an abortion and a woman causing her own abortion as separate offences.
Instead, the first court had spoken about abortion in more general terms, failing to clarify which of the two offences the woman was guilty of.
The appeals court stopped short of considering the concerns raised by the defence, including the over-reliance on second-hand testimony and the uncertainty over the cause of the miscarriage.
Scerri Herrera declared the initial judgment null and void, with the case now set to return to the court of magistrates for a fresh hearing.
The woman was represented by lawyers Martina Caruana and Emma Portelli Bonnici.