Marlene Mizzi’s acquittal over offensive letter to judge confirmed on appeal

Marlene Mizzi’s acquittal from a criminal charge over an insulting letter she sent Judge Lawrence Mintoff has been confirmed on appeal.

Mizzi was acquitted of the contravention in July after the Magistrates Court ruled the case against her to be time-barred.

The former Labour MEP was charged over an insulting letter to Mr Justice Mintoff, who had presided over an appeal from a decision in a libel case she had filed against Nationalist MEP David Casa. Mizzi had lost the libel case and the judge had upheld the original judgment.

She subsequently was charged in court over an insulting letter she sent Mintoff but the court ruled that the case was time-barred.
The Attorney General had subsequently filed an appeal, arguing that the lower court had stated elsewhere in its decision that Mizzi had been notified in the correct period.

Madam Justice Edwina Grima, deciding the appeal this morning, observed that the date of the offence, as indicated in the writ of summons, was 17 February 2021, from which point the three-month prescriptive period for contraventions started to run.

The court noted that the criminal action had begun on 12 May 2021, when Mizzi was spoken to by the police and had released her statement.

The first sitting in the case was held on 2 June, during which the defence argued that the case was time-barred by the passage of over three months from the writing of the letter.

Two attempts to notify Mizzi appeared to have taken place on 13 May, said the court, with the summons being handed to her husband, former judge Antonio Mizzi, who had answered the police constable’s knock on the door at 8am.

However, whilst the time, month and year of delivery of the summons were written clearly, the date was not, and had several numbers scribbled on top of each other.

Mizzi’s lawyer, Edward Gatt, entered a plea of prescription, arguing that the summons indicated two or more dates of service and therefore doubt existed as to when it happened. Doubt had to be interpreted in favour of the accused, submitted the lawyer.

The prosecution had failed to summon the police officer who had distributed the notification to testify and clarify what had been scribbled, said the judge, adding that it should have anticipated this problem as the problem with deciphering the date was self-evident.

Quoting from jurisprudence on the matter, the court pointed out that a person accused of a contravention is not bound to produce any evidence and once the plea of prescription is raised it is the duty of the prosecution to prove that the action wasn’t time-barred.

It should have been clear to the prosecution that the notification of summons was not the best evidence to overcome the plea raised by the defence and it should have produced the officer who delivered the summons to testify, said the judge.

“According to the Attorney General, as the first attempt at service of the summons took place on 13 May 2021, then it was evident that the second attempt took place the next day. The Court is not expected to rely on assumptions. Certainly, the way the date of service was written on the summons doesn’t reflect the way it should be done, with indecipherable handwriting. Neither is it expected that the Court attempt to decipher the writing, consisting of a scribble, itself in order to save the prosecution’s action at all costs,” said the judge.

“Therefore, this Court remains faced with reasonable doubt about the date on which the summons in question was delivered and sees no reason to depart from the decision reached by the first court,” the judge ruled.