Man has sentence reduced on appeal, faces new €13,000 fine

An appeals court has repealed a 6-month prison sentence handed to an Ivorian man after it saw how he had repeatedly disobeyed court-imposed curfews amending his prison term to two months and fining him €13,450.

Mumin Trabulè, 36, had filed an appeal after he was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment last December, having been found guilty of attempting to escape from police officers who had spotted him acting suspiciously in Qawra.

Trabulè, who goes by five aliases – Moumen Trouse, Mumen Traore, Mouman Troure and Mumin Trabulè – had been on bail pending several criminal proceedings and had been immediately identified after being arrested.

Trabulè was well known to the police and had served an eight-year sentence for the rape of two Maltese women, a conviction confirmed on appeal.

He had also pleaded guilty to stealing items from Paceville in September 2014 and had also been arrested twice in the space of a week in March 2015 on drugs offences.

The Ivorian had also been sentenced to 18 months’ imprisonment for theft in November last year from which he had filed an appeal.

However in a sentence handed down last Thursday, the Court of Appeal repealed the December judgement and decided the case once more, on the merits, after he noted that the first court had failed to mention the article of the law under which the man had been found guilty.

Re-assessing the evidence, Mr. Justice Giovanni Grixti noted that the accused had been granted bail on three occasions, on the condition that he be home by 9pm.

“Naturally, anyone could suffer an emergency which would excuse the non-observance [of this condition], but in this case, not evidence to that effect had been tabled and therefore the court is finding the appellant guilty.”

Trabulè was also declared guilty of relapsing. The man was handed a two-month prison sentence and all previous bail decrees were revoked. The court finally also ordered the confiscation of a total of €13,450 in various personal guarantees and bail deposits by the accused.