Prosecutors will have to discard statements made to the police by a man charged with murdering his estranged wife because those statements were taken in the absence of a lawyer, a court has ruled.

Madam Justice Consuelo Scerri Herrera said that whatever Andrew Mangion told the police during questioning could prejudice the overall fairness of the proceedings.

This was despite the fact that the law at the time, five years ago, only allowed suspects to consult their lawyer for up to one hour before their interrogation and before the lawyer’s presence was made mandatory.

Mangion, 45, is facing a trial by jury, with a potential life sentence hanging over his head, for his alleged involvement in the murder of his estranged wife, Eleonor Mangion-Walker whose body was found by the police dumped under wooden pallets in a Qormi warehouse on July 3, 2016, following a tip-off.

Mangion turned himself in a few days after the murder amid a nationwide police manhunt launched following the discovery of the body. He stands charged with killing the mother of his young daughter.

'Statement inadmissible'

Madam Justice Scerri Herrera was ruling on preliminary pleas raised by the man’s lawyers.

She quoted a raft of jurisprudence in her near 100-page decision, including rulings by the European Court of Human Rights which observed that the concept of fairness enshrined in the European Convention requires that the accused be given the benefit of the assistance of a lawyer already at the initial stages of police interrogation.

In one such ruling, the court had said that "the lack of legal assistance during an applicant’s interrogation would constitute a restriction of his defence rights in the absence of compelling reasons that do not prejudice the overall fairness of the proceedings.”

The judge said that although this right was not part of Malta’s law at the time of Mangion’s arrest and interrogation, the court could not discard the fact that anything he could have said during the police questioning would render unfair the judicial process against him.

She said that despite the voluminous caselaw on this legal point, the court did not have “legal certainty” on this issue.

The judge noted that Mangion’s statement released to the police during his two interrogations on July 12 and 13, 2016, was “quite voluminous” and that although he is not admitting that he killed Mangion-Walker, there are several instances where he is incriminating himself.

“Therefore, when corroborated with other evidence, it can have a significant impact on the proceedings against the accused,” the judge observed.

“While in no way declaring that the statement released by the accused as detrimental to [his] rights, and in view of the fact that the courts to this day still give different directions as to [the admissibility] of a statement which has been taken in the absence of an advocate or legal procurator, the court [believes that] in the interests of justice and the integrity of the process, this statement, as well as any reference to it, shall be declared inadmissible,” the judge ruled.

She ordered the removal of both statements, their transcript and any reference to the statements from the acts of the proceedings, including testimonies given by other people during the course of the compilation of evidence against the accused.

According to media reports of the compilation of evidence, police superintendent Keith Arnaud told the court how Mangion claimed under interrogation that two armed men had grabbed his wife when she was leaving his Swieqi garage and murdered her before his very eyes.

He told police that the two men held both of them at gunpoint and claimed that one of the men got a plank of wood out of a shoulder bag and repeatedly bashed Mangion-Walker on the head with it.

He said he panicked once the two men fled as he feared he would be blamed for his wife’s murder.