Court orders retrial of convicted man, awards €3,000 in compensation

The First Hall of the Civil Court in its Constitutional Jurisdiction has ordered the retrial of a man whose drug trafficking conviction had been confirmed on appeal, after it heard that the only evidence against him was a statement he had given in police custody without his lawyer being present.

Trevor Bonnici, who is currently on parole, was also awarded €3,000 in compensation for the breach of his fundamental right to a fair trial and released.

Bonnici had been arrested in July 2004 on suspicion of involvement in drug trafficking and was interrogated the next day, having spent around 20 hours in police custody. 

While under arrest, Bonnici had released a statement to the police, on the strength of which he was eventually convicted. He had not been given access to a lawyer beforehand. Bonnici had refused to sign the police statement and had told the arraigning magistrate that he had only released the statement so he could “go home and eat”.

This conviction was quashed in a judgement that was handed down earlier this morning.

Judge Mark Chetcuti noted that Bonnici's statement had been the sum total of the evidence against the accused when he had been charged before the Court of Magistrates and that this point had also been conceded by the Court of Appeal in a 2015 judgement confirming the original sentence of 18 months behind bars, plus a €1,500 fine.

That court had noted the statement released by the appellant to the police as constituting "the only incriminating evidence" against him.

The right to legal assistance during police interrogation and the right to access the police file had not been a part of Maltese law at the time; this practise had been condemned by the judgement of the European Court of Fundamental Human Rights in the case Mario Borg vs Malta last January.

That judgement had noted that a defendant's rights would be “irretrievably prejudiced when incriminating statements made during police interrogation without access to a lawyer are used for conviction."

The judge was in no doubt that the man's right to a fair hearing had been breached by the use of this incriminating statement to convict the man.

The court noted that its Constitutional jurisdiction precluded it from making a fresh evaluation of the evidence. Instead it overturned the judgements against Bonnici and ordered the criminal proceedings to start anew in front of a different magistrate.

Bonnici was awarded €3,000 in civil damages for the violation of his fundamental rights under the European Convention.

Lawyers Jason Azzopardi, Eve Borg Costanzi, Kris Busietta and Julian Farrugia appeared for Bonnici.