Life
Norbert Schembri has been sentenced to imprisonment for life for the murder of his daughter’s mother. The jury’s verdict was 8:1. Does this mean that one of the jurors believes he is innocent, despite the indisputable evidence that he was the one who killed her? No, it doesn’t. Jury verdicts are never unanimous in Malta. There is always one ‘not guilty’ vote. The jurors do this to protect themselves. They are on full view to the person in the dock and to his or her friends, family and, in the case of drug trials and similar, criminal associates. If they return a unanimous ‘guilty’ verdict, each one of them will be known to have voted ‘guilty’ for certain, exposing himself/herself to revenge. But if there is at least one ‘not guilty’ vote, anyone who has a mind to seek revenge will never find out who voted ‘guilty’ and who voted ‘not guilty’. And so you get situations like this one, where Norbert Schembri is clearly guilty beyond all reasonable doubt of the murder of Josette Scicluna, yet still the verdict is 8:1 – the Maltese version of a unanimous jury verdict. I knew even before the jury foreman returned that verdict that it would be 8:1, and I’m quite sure the judge did, too.
It’s easy to forget, in the welter of sympathy for the dead woman’s family that the murderer has parents and siblings, too. Quite contrary to what you might expect, they are quiet and decent people who are going through a peculiar sort of hell that is probably not much different to what the victim’s parents are enduring. Norbert Schembri’s father and brother supply paraffin to the whole of Sliema and most of St Julian’s – I still drive there once a week to stock up – and so did his uncle Giljan when I was a child. Practically everyone who grew up in Sliema knows them.
And just in case you were wondering – no, a life sentence does not mean literally imprisonment until death. It is generally around 25 years. Certainly, no one has served a longer prison term than that here in Malta, at least within living memory. I remember writing a newspaper article about this with Natalino Fenech, now head of news at PBS, way back in 1992, when the Egyptair hijacker was about to be released unexpectedly after serving just seven years. He was then put on a plane to some destination in Africa, and the Americans seized him when he landed, then carted him off for trial and a more appropriate term of imprisonment in the United States.
And please remember that the last man to stab the mother of his child in this way got a seven-year sentence – that’s right, seven years. Apparently, she had taunted him and had taken one of his condoms to use when having sex with another man, so she was thought to have deserved a frenzied knife attack and some 50 stab wounds. That particular man actually walked out of the court room a free man, despite his sentence, because time spent on remand was deducted along with time off for this and that, presidential pardons calculated in advance (remember those?) and so on. The woman was called Diane Gerada, and she was stabbed just as viciously and received a comparable number of wounds to Josette Scicluna’s. She was in bed alongside the couple’s two-year-old son at the time, and when she crawled to the balcony to call for help, her husband went to the bathroom, picked up the lavatory bleach, and poured it all over her bleeding body.
Just bear that in mind. It was only around 10 years ago. The case, and more so the trial and the verdict, had shocked me so deeply that it still reverberates. It was an all-male jury then and it was an all-male jury now. I like to think this is an indication that attitudes are changing. Back then, I remember being in a minority when expressing shock at such a short sentence for the ferocious stabbing of that woman by her husband, when she was in bed with their toddler, what’s more….and then that psycho gesture of contempt, pouring lavatory cleaner all over her as she lay dying (“Eeeeee, but she provoked him! She told him she had slept with another man – what do you expect? Ma ttihx tort, hu.”). A seven-year sentence for a hideous crime like that would be inconceivable today, and not just where Judge Galea Debono is concerned, either.
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Meta tehel ghomrok il-habs trid taghmel is-sentenza kollha u mhux 25 jew 20 sena tohorgok biss il mewt. Malta bhalissa hawn xi erba persuni iservu sentenza ta ghomorhom il-habs fosthom dak li qatel il Sylvia King u dak li qatel erba minn nies fiz-Zejtun.
[Daphne – L-anqas xejn. Niftakar car li meta ktibna dak l-artiklu, Natalino Fenech u jiena konna iccassajna meta skoprejna li hadd hawn Malta kien ghamel izjed minn 25 sena habs. Dak taz-Zejtun u Harrington li qatel lil-King ilhom inqas minn 25 sena l-habs. Issa naraw meta johorgu. Li nista nghid zgur huwa li tnehhiet is-sistema redikola ta’ mahfriet presidenzjali b’rutina. Dan Schembri ghandu hiss 32 sena, jigifieri kif qed tghid inti jista jaghmel 60 sena habs – ovvja li dan muhiex se jsir. Hawnhekk mhux l-Amerika. U nahseb li m’ ghandux issir jekk il-prigunier muhiex ta’ periklu kbir ghall-pubbliku, li dan il-bniedem fil-fatt muhiex.]
I wish to debunk this common misconception. Life imprisonment means just that. Mr. Schembri shall, barring the derogation provided for by Article 493 of the Criminal Code, spend the rest of his life in prison.
Article 493 reads as follows-
[Quote] – “After sentencing any person to imprisonment for life, the court may recommend in writing to the Prime Minister within twenty-four hours the minimum period which in its view should elapse before the prisoner is released from prison. Such recommendation shall be made available to the person sentenced,and a copy thereof shall be kept by the registrar.” [Unquote].
This recommendation is merely discretionary and unless Justice Galea Debono has opted to excercise it, Mr. Schembri shall never be release from jail.
[Daphne – In theory yes, in practice not. Any sentence can be over-ridden by a presidential pardon or several. It is in nobody’s interest to keep a man in prison for 60 years, when the sentence is a punishment and not serving the purpose of keeping a very dangerous man away from society. I repeat that in 1992, the justice ministry replied to my questions with the information that the longest prison term served in Malta was 25 years, and that life generally means no longer than that.]
I beg to differ. Life in Malta (like in Italy) means just that, life.
[Daphne – It doesn’t mean life in Italy, either. The only country in the democratic west that I can think of right now which keeps people in jail routinely until they die (as opposed to, say, special cases like Myra Hindley) is the United States. And no, it doesn’t mean life in Malta which is why there are no people in their dotage at Corradino, even though there have been several life sentences over the last few decades. No public announcements are made when people are released from jail before their official sentence is up. With that Egyptair hijacker in the 1992 case I mentioned earlier, not even the US embassy knew he was about to be released.]
If you think that’s bad, in Sweden a life sentence is 12 years. The only time a sentence is longer is if the prisoner is deemed to pose a serious risk to the public, after a psychiatric evaluation.
More annoyingly, the money spent on feeding prisoners, per meal, in Sweden is more than four times the amount, per meal, of school children. I’m all in favour of a liberal penal system, where sentences are handed out to rehabilitate as much as penalise, but the current situation is ridiculous.
Taunting family members of the deceased? He is beyond redemption.
Daphne, there is never a unanimous vote of any jury in Malta if you notice. The unofficial reason is that juries are “advised” to always have at least one dissenting vote, so that if the guilty party or his/her family approach them in some future date “biex jiehdu sodisfazzjon” each juror can claim that his/her vote was the dissenting one. Get it?
[Daphne – Isn’t that just what I wrote here above?]
Sorry, I skipped that part when reading quickly through it. My mistake.
We do have 11 people serving life sentences in jail, however I get Daphne’s point.
And this has been going on for years. We all heard of Twanny Aquilina’s murder in the 60s when he was almost decapitated by his mother Giga. By the 70s, she was out and about.
While David Schembri is unlikely to be a widespread danger to society, can you imagine having people like Mosbah Ben Brahim and Ben Ali Wahid Ben Hassine (it’s not because of their nationality, they could have been female Swedish blondes for all I know) out and about in 2013?
[Daphne – The last two you mentioned will be deported from Malta on their release – so thinking purely selfishly, they can be released tomorrow and the problem exported.]
Daphne, no matter whether they are in Malta or abroad, they still may pose a danger to society per se. For me, a murder committed in Algeria, Tunisia, London, or Malta, is still a murder which will bring anguish to the victims’ loved ones.
Beg to differ with Adrian. A few months ago there was a unanimous vote of a jury in Malta. If I remember correctly it was the one when two Libyans were accused of raping two Swedish girls on the beach. It was a unanimous vote and I remember writing on this blog that precisely because they were Arabs and the Maltese jury were not afraid of any repercussions, the jury gave a unanimous verdict.
[Daphne – We’re a lot closer to Sicily than we realise.]
[The unofficial reason is that juries are “advised” to always have at least one dissenting vote]
@ Adrian Borg
Do you advise the juries accordingly?
Ergajt cekkjajt il fatti, daphne ghandek zball ghomrok huwa ghomrok li qeghda tirreferi ghalih inti huwa li wara 25 sena shah l mhallef jista jaghti parir biex l imputat jinheles jew jestendiha ghad diskrezzjoni tieghu.
[Daphne – Mhux hekk ghidt jien? Ghaliex tahseb li Corradino muhiex dar tal-anzjani? Ghax hadd ma jdum hemmhekk izjed minn 25 sena, life jew mhux life.]
@Edgar Gatt
You are right of course, I was think of juries where the accused is Maltese
@Leo Said
What’s your point? I simply wrote about what I have heard is done from acquantances that served as jurors. I have never served as a juror myself nor have I ever been in any position to give such advice!
Here’s a film for you, Daphne, seeing as you’re a bit of a cinophile or whatever they’re called: MR 73
@H.P.Baxxter
Cineaste.
Straight tip though. Seems to be a good movie. Very realistic, they say.
Life imprisonment hardly ever makes sense. Traditionally, there are four justifications of punishment: deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation and retribution. Only retribution can justify the need to detain someone for life.
But retribution has only emotional qualities – a matter of revenge and vindictiveness. It has no utilitarian effect.
From a ‘deterrence’ perspective, there is no justification to detain a person for life. The most effective type of deterrence is physical deterrence, such as target hardening (a fence) or police patrols. The deterrent value of what comes after being caught is less significant. No would-be perpetrator would stop to think about the difference between 5 and 10 years imprisonment. He does not intend to to be caught in the first place. This is evidenced by the high rate of relapsers, which largely shows that specific deterrence works even less than generic. (Generic deterrence applies to the largely law-abiding population as a whole).
As to rehabilitation, there is clearly no justification here since life imprisonment defeats the aims. Rehabilitation, a post-WWII positivist fad, has been out of fashion since it became clear that institutional cages do not rehabilitate people but break them down.
Then comes incapacitation – which is wholly utilitarian in application. A person is imprisoned in order to stop him from committing more crimes – not for his own sake but for the sake of the community. But generally speaking people prone to criminal behaviour mature and straighten out by the age of 35-40. The more time they spend being treated like dogs in a state institution, the longer it takes for them to straighten out. In any case, it is unlikely that a 60-year-old would seek to commit serious crimes once he’s out of prison.
It is largely in the Land of the Free that they have geriatric prisons for those who were not electrocuted, gassed or injected with poison by the state. In the US, the prison population is now reaching 1000 persons per 100,000 population (mostly for non-violent, drug related crimes). So with 5% of the world population, the US holds 25% of the world’s prisoners. To give you some perspective, at that rate Malta would have housed 4000 prisoners at Corradino. Nearly every family in Malta would have been acquainted to a prisoner. The rate in Malta was around 35/100k in the 1970s and now it stands at around 80-90/100k (mostly foreigners). In Europe it averages around 100-120/100k – and always rising, especially in the UK where it must be close to 200/100k by now.
And is there less crime? Of course not – that’s not how it works. What they have been doing for the past 30-40 years is creating more crime through the very same actions aimed at preventing it… but that would take volumes for its not mainstream at all. In the Pollyanna world, we will succeed if only we could enact more laws with higher sentences, have more police on the streets and build more prisons(Parkinson’s law then sets in). No wonder they now have 14 FEMA camps in the US – sparkling new and empty, ready to take in guests. But Obama will close Guantanamo… so the problem is solved.
I might be wrong (Daphne stop pulling your hair!) but in Italy they are sentenced to ‘Al Gastero’ (more hair pulling because of my spelling!) which means LIFE.
[Daphne – You know, I’m really amazed that some people find this so hard to understand. Wherever in the world people are sentenced to life, it means just that, life – otherwise it would be called something else, like for example, 25 years. But despite being sentenced to life imprisonment, in no western democracy that I can think of other than the USA are people actually kept in prison until they die, despite being sentenced to life imprisonment. This is because the state has no interest in turning the jails into old people’s homes, or in keeping doddering old men in jail just for the hell of it, and just because there’s no point in doing so when the person is not a threat. So they are let out on parole, or pardoned, or whatever, but the fact is that they are not kept in prison longer than a couple of decades. There are some exceptions, as with, notoriously, Myra Hindley (I mention her because she’s the first one to spring to mind), but apart from that – they’re let out one way or another, even though life means life on paper. Another factor influencing this is that people live much longer now. They no longer routinely die at 65 or 70, and animals in captivity live longer than they do in the wild. So whereas in the first half of the 20th century, sentencing a man of 40 to life in prison might mean that he died at 65 anyway, nowadays you’re looking at 50 years in jail, which is ludicrous. Do you understand now?]
Presently there is one anzjan serving life imprisonment for four times. I don’t know what will happen after 25 years to this one.]
[Daphne – Please explain how a person can be sentenced to life imprisonment four times in a row. Did he get out of jail while serving a life sentence to commit the other crimes?]
So can you all tell me why there are sentences of 30 or 35 years (Emmanuel Camilleri etc.)? Doesn’t that defeat the argument that life means 25 years? By the way one year actually means 8 months due to remission.
[Daphne – Oh dear, here’s another one. Life doesn’t mean 25 years. Please make the distinction clear in your head. Life means life, but despite that, nobody spends longer than 25 years in jail because one way or another the prison authorities need to clear out that house.]
Too many Frenchified cliché subplots, but not the worst film I’ve seen, by far. And it’s straight on topic.
Il verdett gust kellu jkun…Li Norbert Schembri sakkruh wahdu go Corradino u armu ic cavetta tac cella go l’ocean.
Re Diane Gerada – I remember the case clearly. Apart from the two-year-old child, there was also, if I am not mistaken, another of the couple’s children – a girl aged around 10 – sleeping on a mattress in the same room. She (the girl) had desperately tried to call for help but, sadly, had dialled “999” instead of Malta’s then emergency number of “191” (or whatever it was at the time), having remembered the number from “Flying Doctors” or some other programme she used to watch. That child is probably scarred for life and yet, the father walked free.
As for Schembri’s family, I’m glad you wrote what you did. The father is such a decent, humble and “old world” polite man, that it is hard to imagine what he is going through at the moment, along with the other members of the family. Yes, they too are victims in this case.
[Daphne – Some people don’t have the imagination to see that it is much worse to be the father of the murderer than the father of the victim in a case like this.]