8.55pm Correction - Judge Antonio Mizzi resigned his MBA post before action was taken against him.

A judge who mistakenly jailed a man for harassing a blogger is expected to appear before the Commission for the Administration of Justice over his gaffe, The Sunday Times of Malta has learnt.

Mr Justice Giovanni Grixti will face disciplinary measures, given that an internal inquiry found the error was entirely his own, as he wrote the judgment in its entirety.

The embarrassing mistake was made last month. Mr Justice Grixti jailed Żurrieq mayor Ignatius Farrugia for four days after confirming a conviction for harassing blogger Daphne Caruana Galizia in 2013.

Mr Farrugia had been fined €2,400 and ordered to stay away from Ms Caruana Galizia for a year. Mr Farrugia appealed the judgment, with the guilty verdict being confirmed by Mr Justice Grixti, who then converted the fine to effective jail time.

Mr Farrugia was escorted to prison but when Mr Justice Grixti realised his mistake, he immediately petitioned the President to pardon Mr Farrugia and release him. Two hours later Mr Farrugia was out of jail.

Disciplinary action against a member of the judiciary is quite rare. Proceedings before the Commission for the Administration of Justice, a constitutional body, are secret and meetings are always held behind closed doors.

However, there have been a handful of cases involving magistrates and judges that were made public over the past few years.

Questioned about the matter, Justice Minister Owen Bonnici explained that two internal inquiries had been carried out: one by the Office of the Chief Justice, which investigated the judge, and the Law Courts’ Director General who focused on actions of the staff assigned to the judge.

He refused to give details about the outcome of the two inquiries but sources close to the law courts confirmed that investigations revealed the judge had penned the judgment in full and that he did not realise his mistake until after he had read it out in open court.

As soon as he did, he wrote to the President recommending that Mr Farrugia be pardoned.

On the same day, the Court of Appeal issued a decree ordering that the execution of the judgment be suspended pending the outcome of the recommendation.

President Marie-Louise Coleiro Preca accepted the recommendation, acting upon the advice of Dr Bonnici and Attorney General Peter Grech.

“Final responsibility for the judgment lies with the judge who delivers it,” Dr Bonnici told this newspaper.

“It is not excluded that the Commission for the Administration of Justice, which is an independent constitutional body functioning as a judiciary watchdog, will further enquire into the matter,” he added. When asked whether protocol had been followed in issuing the pardon, Dr Bonnici said: “When errors are committed by the courts of first instance, there is usually the remedy of an appeal. When, in criminal matters, the error is made by a court of appeal there is the remedy of a pardon by the President of Malta, as happened in this case.”

Sources said the matter is to be included in the agenda of the next commission meeting. It has two options: to issue a warning or proceed with impeachment, but legal sources said the matter was probably not serious enough to merit the latter course of action.

Past cases

Proceedings before the Commission for the Administration for Justice are secret and very little information of the proceedings ever emerge.

According to publicly available information, the last member of the judiciary to appear before the commission was retired magistrate Carol Peralta over a party he had allegedly organised in his courtroom a few days before Christmas of 2013.

Before that, Mr Justice Antonio Mizzi was also censured by the Commission due to his presidency of the basketball association. He served out the rest of his term, defying the Commission, before bowing out. 

There was also a case against former judge Lino Farrugia Sacco, in which the judiciary watchdog found him guilty of misbehaviour after he refused to resign from his post as Malta Olympic Committee president in 2014.

The commission took the judge to task over his behaviour during a meeting with two undercover journalists who proposed a way to get around Olympics ticket resale rules. He avoided facing an impeachment motion as he retired before it could be discussed, following lengthy court proceedings he had filed, in which he repeatedly claimed breaches to his human rights.

matthew.xuereb@timesofmalta.com