Magistrate lambasts comedy of errors in illegal fireworks case

A Gozitan man has been cleared of charges relating to the unlicensed procurement and storage of explosives after a court noted that the amount found was less than that needed to make a single firework.

In a scathing judgment, Magistrate Joe Mifsud noted that Spiteri's case was afflicted by poor police work and had been shunted from magistrate to magistrate over the years and that this had unnecessarily prolonged the proceedings.

Mifsud quoted the 2010 judgement by the Court of Criminal Appeal in Police vs Anthony Azzopardi which described the situation where the judiciary alone regulate the tempo with which cases are decided as “unacceptable and in need of corrective legislative measures.”

As recently as last December, noted Magistrate Mifsud, in Onyeabor vs Attorney General the Constitutional Court had railed against a lack of resources required for the efficient administration of judgement on one hand and the inertia by those who operate the system, on the other.

48-year old Joseph Spiteri from Xaghra had been charged in 2008, after police acting on a tip off found a small amount of gunpowder inside a truck that had been garaged in an underground complex in Xaghra.

The shutter to the truck's cargo compartment was found to be open and accessible. In it, the officers had found a small amount of gunpowder and other materials used in firework production.

The garage belonged to Oleander Properties Limited, whilst the truck was registered in Spiteri's name, but was the property of MPJ Limited and had been garaged since 2005.

When questioned by the police, the accused had consistently denied that the explosives were his. He had explained that he had allowed the truck to be used as a store, next to a site where fireworks were let off in the Xaghra feast.

Magistrate Mifsud noted that in the realm of criminal law, a person's guilt must be proved beyond reasonable doubt, the possibility of his innocence being “possible but not in the least probable.”

Basic policing errors had weakened the prosecution's case, noted the court. The police had failed to seal off the area until experts could examine the area, one sergeant deciding to transport the explosives to the Rabat police station. Neither had the police put the site under surveillance to catch the culprits.

In 2008, the court of Criminal Appeal had revoked the sentence handed to the accused, noting that the court of Magistrates had not realised that the charges exceeded its competence. The policeman who had handled the explosives had left his own fingerprints on the evidence and even after these were eliminated, the three other sets of fingerprints found did not match those of the accused.

The court held that it was not in a position to declare that the accused was guilty beyond reasonable doubt as the case had not been proven to the level required by law.