A former prison inmate whose elderly mum ended in trouble after a sachet of heroin was discovered inside her jacket pocket during a visit to her son 11 years ago has been cleared over lack of evidence. 

The 78-year-old, who has since passed away, and her daughter had gone to the Corradino Correctional Facility to visit their relative Victor Buttigieg in February 2011 when, during a routine search, a female officer came across a small sachet inside one of the pockets of the woman’s brown leather jacket. 

She handed the sachet to a male colleague who sniffed at it but said nothing while the woman was allowed to proceed with her visit.

But the encounter with her son had barely started when the woman was called outside and asked to explain what that sachet was doing inside her pocket. 

The woman was subsequently escorted to the Paola police station where she denied any knowledge about the drug, saying that the jacket had been hanging in her wardrobe.

That day she had decided to wear it on her visit to her son.

She thought that the sachet contained some religious medal and insisted that her son had never asked her to smuggle drugs into prison.

Investigations resulted in charges being filed against Buttigieg for illegal possession of heroin on the basis of a statement he released to police two days after the incident. 

He was also charged with relapsing..

A court-appointed expert eventually confirmed that the contents of the sachet were 0.13 grams of heroin, having a 34.6% purity. 

Throughout the proceedings, the prison officers involved in the incident gave their version of the events that day.

The elderly mother had visited her son on previous occasions but they could not recall whether she had ever worn that jacket. 

The inspector who handled the prosecution said that he had not asked the accused to put on the jacket so as to confirm whether it fitted him or not. 

Nor could he tell whether it was a ladies’ or men’s garment and the jacket itself was never produced in evidence in court. 

Another court expert confirmed that between February 21 and 24, the latter being the day of the prison visit, the accused had made 18 phone calls.

Nine of those were not available because of some technical fault.

The others were made to a lawyer, a male person and a woman who appeared to be his partner. 

But neither his mother’s nor his sister’s numbers featured among those calls. 

When delivering judgment, the court, presided over by magistrate Natasha Galea Sciberras, upheld the defence’s argument that the accused’s statement was not admissible in evidence. 

In line with recent case law, such statement released without the suspect being accompanied by a lawyer was to be discarded, even though the right to such degree of legal assistance was not envisaged under Maltese law at the time of the incident. 

Once that statement was cast aside, there was no other evidence showing that the drug was in the accused’s possession that day. 

The prosecution did not prove that the jacket actually belonged to the accused.

More importantly, the prosecution failed to prove that the drug was allegedly in Buttigieg’s possession some time before the day of his mother’s visit.

Nor had it been proven that the mother and son had agreed that she was to smuggle the drug into prison, said the court, pointing out further that there was no evidence that the accused had called his mother or sister in the days before their visit. 

Once the charge of possession was not proven, the other charge of relapsing could not stand, concluded the magistrate, pronouncing an acquittal.

Lawyers Franco Debono and Francesca Zarb were defence counsel.