Legal practitioners, even law students, know the corpus delicti rule is essential for a successful prosecution and conviction. If the body of a crime is missing, the chances are the case will collapse, as happened last week when the police arraigned a notorious entrepreneur and charged him with perjury.
To ensure the corpus delicti, the prosecution needs to produce evidence that a crime occurred and that someone is responsible for it.
In the botched prosecution, the police received a report, from a magistrate, to boot, that a person lied under oath.
As would happen when dealing with any other report about a crime being committed, the police would have proceeded to establish the facts.
Further investigations might have been required to compile and eventually present in court evidence to prove the case beyond reasonable doubt.
Elementary, one would think. But that did not happen in this case. Was it a genuine mistake? Did the police rush and stumble?
If that were the case, an immediate official public apology was the least the police could do. But, no, when Times of Malta asked questions, the police would only say they will appeal the court’s decision to acquit the accused. They refused to give any further information on the convenient pretext that there were “ongoing court proceedings”.
Because of the principle of double jeopardy, the entrepreneur cannot be arraigned again to face the same perjury charges
What seems to have bothered the police commissioner are “insinuations made”, even if he did not elaborate, though he asked the Independent Police Complaints Board to look into them.
Such attitude rightly gives rise to suspicion that there was more than meets the eye. Three main issues immediately come to mind.
First, the colourful background of the prosecuting officer. The officer had been investigated in the past over an “attempted cover-up” to protect Labour politicians and associates. He was dismissed in 2017 but reinstated under the present police commissioner.
Second, we need to look at past ‘connections’ between the accused and the prime minister. The man, who is facing a number of serious crime charges, features in suspicious property deals involving Robert Abela.
Third, the magistrate who asked the police to press perjury charges. This magistrate is certainly not in Abela’s or Joseph Muscat’s good books, and that is putting it very mildly. She is the one who conducted the damning hospitals concession magisterial inquiry.
Here was an open and shut case. But when the prosecuting officer appeared before the magistrate hearing the perjury case, he submitted a number of documents bar the most crucial: transcripts of the testimony that led to the case. It took a Nationalist MP 12 minutes to obtain a copy of the testimony transcript from the court registry.
The attorney general was not in a position to declare there was no room for prosecution, as did, in fact, happen in the past. Neither was this a private citizen ‘frivolously’ asking a magistrate to look into allegations of wrongdoing. Botching up the prosecution, many rightly suspect, was the only way out. Therefore, the police have a lot of explaining to do.
Because of the principle of double jeopardy, the entrepreneur cannot be arraigned again to face the same perjury charges.
We do not know yet on what grounds the attorney general will be appealing. The police may well be heading headfirst into a situation where they will get a good dressing down by the court of appeal.
This botched prosecution is no lapsus. It is clear evidence why recourse to magisterial inquiries remains a must for justice to reign supreme.