Court acquits two men of construction site thefts

Two men have been declared not guilty of a string of thefts of construction equipment, with the court noting that although the items stolen were similar, as were the vehicles involved, reasonable doubt had not been eliminated.

Joseph Galea, a 32-year-old from Żebbuġ and Emanuel Degabriele, 33, from Attard had been charged last year, accused of stealing power tools, fittings, batteries and construction equipment from construction sites in Qrendi, Attard, Naxxar, Kirkop and Dingli in January 2021. They were also accused of recidivism.

Galea and Degabriele had consistently denied the charges.

The pair had been arrested after police received a tip-off about a suspected theft underway from a construction site.

A Kia Avella in which the stolen tools had been stashed, was discovered close by.

The two men were arrested after police officers found them in a nearby garage, at an hour when both of them should have been at home, in terms of their bail conditions.

The Court of Magistrates, presided by magistrate Rachel Montebello dismissed the defence’s claim that recordings of phone calls - placed by Degabriele to his partner from prison, while he was in preventive custody for other offences, in which he appears to allude to the thefts - were inadmissible, ruling that the law was quite clear that the right not to self-incriminate did not extend to evidence consisting of material that could be forcibly taken from the arrested person and consequently, neither did it extend to situations of spontaneous and voluntary confessions to third parties, where the suspect is not compelled to do so.

“Above all these phone calls and the things said in them were made voluntarily and in full knowledge on the part of the defendant that the telephone calls he makes from prison could be recorded.”

The court, however, noted that at the same time this was an extrajudicial confession which was not made before a court or investigative body and therefore had to be corroborated by other evidence to have probatory value. In this case there was no such corroboration, said the magistrate and pointed out that at no time during his interrogation had Degabriele admitted to involvement in the thefts with which he was being charged.

The prosecution had also exhibited CCTV from one of the sites targeted by the thieves, which showed what appeared to be a Kia Avella passing by the site twice before parking in front of it. The magistrate said that although it shows two unidentified individuals emerging from the vehicle and behaving suspiciously, doubt remained as to the exact model of the car, much less that it was the same car in which the stolen items were found.

None of the evidence conclusively tied either of the defendants to the other thefts, said the court, nor did any eyewitnesses place the defendants on the scene of the crime.

While true that some of the stolen tools were found in Degabriele’s possession, this fact alone, without evidence tying him to the scene of the crime did not exclude reasonable doubt that someone else could have stolen them and was insufficient for the finding of guilt.

The court concluded that although on a general level, the prosecution had convinced it that the co-accused could have possibly carried out the thefts mentioned in the charges, because many of the thefts had common threads and the the type of items stolen were similar and had been committed around the same time, none of the individual charges of thefts had been proven beyond reasonable doubt.

The defendants were acquitted of all charges. Lawyer Nicholas Mifsud represented Galea, while lawyer Charles Mercieca appeared for Degabriele.