A man caught with stolen items inside his garage has been spared jail time after a court noted that he appeared to be making a genuine effort to make a clean break from his criminal past.
Keith Pace, a 40-year old Marsa resident with a tainted criminal record, was facing charges of aggravated theft, handling stolen items, wilful damage to third party property as well as breaching previous court orders.
The charges dated back to September 2018, when several items including a TV set, stereo and soundbar were reported stolen from a Ħamrun house.
Seven months later, the police tracked down the stolen items at a Marsa premises belonging to Pace.
The suspected thief landed back in court, pleading innocence.
When delivering judgment the court, presided over by magistrate Joseph Mifsud, found no conclusive evidence that Pace had stolen the items.
Although there was no doubt that a theft had been committed, neither CCTV footage nor forensic evidence, including fingerprints, linked him to the scene of the crime, the court said.
It therefore cleared him of that accusation as well as the charge of having willfully damaged the property that had been broken into.
However, the court was convinced beyond reasonable doubt that Pace was aware of the criminal origin of the stolen items.
Magistrate Mifsud observed that the accused was streetwise and given his life experience, the man could tell whether any particular item had been acquired through illicit means.
The charge of handling stolen property is proved if there is evidence showing that the item was actually stolen or obtained through unlawful means, that the accused accepted the item and that he was aware of its unlawful origin.
All three factors had been sufficiently proved, concluded the court.
Despite that, the court concluded that in this case, a term of effective imprisonment would undo all the man’s efforts.
Pending court proceedings, Pace had finally “grabbed the bull by the horns” and had turned to Oasi foundation for rehabilitation.
Casting aside the man’s efforts at “the stroke of a pen” would be easier, observed Magistrate Mifsud, but to do so would be a “slap on the face” also for the voluntary organisation that reaches out to those needing professional and loving care.
In the light of such considerations, the court declared the accused guilty of handling the stolen items but placed him under a three-year probation period, expecting regular updates every six months from the officer assigned to monitor Pace’s progress.
Lawyers Franco Debono and Amadeus Cachia were defence counsel.