Murder verdict overturned

A Pietà man who was originally jailed for 20 years for the murder of his sister-in-law has had his jail term reduced by a year after the Court of Criminal Appeal cleared him of murder but found him guilty of inflicting serious injuries that led to death.

On July 4, 2001, jurors in the trial of 57-year-old Salvu Gauci found him guilty, by six votes to three, of murdering his wife's sister, Anna Kok.

Gauci stabbed Kok, 44, several times in the thigh while she was walking in Hamrun on March 20, 1997, at about 8.45 a.m. Kok died 13 days later in hospital.

The presiding judge noted that Gauci wanted to avenge himself for what he thought was her interference in his marriage.

Gauci appealed the outcome of his trial and argued that the evidence brought by the prosecution could not have led to his being found guilty of murder but, if anything, of serious injury followed by death.

Chief Justice Vincent De Gaetano, Mr Justice Joseph Filletti and Mr Justice David Scicluna noted that during the summing-up the first court was not correct in telling jurors that "everybody expected the natural consequences of his/her actions".

Besides, the judges noted, the first court had embraced the prosecution's banal argument that no matter in which part of the body one was stabbed, there always existed the possibility of hitting a vein or artery and, therefore, if that person died as a result of the stab wound the intention of murder (possibly indirect) existed.

In so doing the first court practically excluded the optional verdict of serious injury followed by death, the judges noted.

Gauci's intent at the time remained a matter of subjective opinion and not merely an objective opinion of what he should have anticipated.

A person of normal intelligence would not have thought that a stab in the upper thigh could lead to death. If the jurors concluded the contrary, the judges ruled, then it was possibly due to the fact that the summing-up presented them with the wrong context on which to reach verdict.