The road to hell
You know what they say: the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Sometimes, people can be misguided and nonsensical in their compassion – if it is compassion at all, and not just a publicity-seeking exercise.
I don’t like the calls for the early release from prison of Saviour Gauci, who was sent down for 20 years for stabbing and killing his wife’s sister on a busy street.
Make that ‘even earlier release’ rather than ‘early release’: what with time off for good behaviour and the usual rot, he has had several years knocked off that sentence already – more than a third.
Those who are campaigning right now to have him let out of prison immediately are doing so because he has terminal cancer and has been given only a short while to live. To which my reaction is: so what?
The fact that he has cancer now does not change the circumstances of the case – that he attacked his sister-in-law and killed her – and nor the circumstances of his sentencing. What are we arguing here – that murderers with cancer are deserving of special treatment?
That prisoners have the right to die at home rather than in prison, even if they are serving a sentence? With that line of reasoning, anyone over the age of 80 can commit murder safe in the knowledge that he won’t be sent to prison because he might die there.
There’s been a lot of blather about forgiveness. But it is not up to us to forgive for we were not at the receiving end of the crime. And for that matter, this has nothing to do with forgiveness. Forgiveness is a personal thing. It is not the business of the state.
The state’s responsibility is to ensure that murderers are caught, prosecuted, found guilty (if they are so) and suitably punished in accordance with the law.
The people who are in a position to forgive Gauci for murdering Anna Kok, a Maltese woman who was married to a Dutch man, are her widower and her son. Both of them are adamant that Gauci should serve his sentence, even if it means that he dies in prison.
Mr Kok was horrified to discover, when he was interviewed by a newspaper, that Gauci will serve far less than those 20 years. “It can’t be possible,” he said. But it is possible, and it is true.
Mr Kok described how his life was ruined when his wife was murdered. “I wake up with it and go to sleep with it,” he said. His son, who was 13 at the time, still can’t come to terms with the loss, in such a dreadful way, of his mother – and this was made worse, he told a journalist, by the fact that Saviour Gauci was his favourite uncle. So there are enormous loss-of-trust issues here, too.
Possibly egged on by the campaigners, other prisoners have offered to serve the remainder of Gauci’s sentence. Those who are encouraging them to do this are silly and irresponsible. They must know, even if some prisoners don’t (or pretend not to) that prison sentences cannot be transferred to third parties.
The reason should be obvious, as one lawyer told a reporter – did the newspaper have to ask about something so basic, for heaven’s sake? If you can transfer a sentence, then you can transfer it in a variety of situations. Parents would serve sentences instead of their children, or vice versa.
The rich would pay the poor and desperate to serve a sentence on their behalf. And on it would go.
But there’s another reason why the ‘release Saviour Gauci’ campaigners are terribly irresponsible. They have failed to consider the nature of his crime, and its particular significance in Malta. In this tiny population, a disproportionately large number of women are murdered violently by men.
Almost no men are murdered by women, even though it is usually women who are provoked and mistreated beyond the limits of endurance. Just a short while ago, a woman was stabbed to death in the street just like Anna Kok, as she got off a bus after working to put food on the table for her children, because her estranged husband refused to do so. Only this time, the killer was her husband and not her brother-in-law.
The reason, however, was similar: anger at the loss of his wife, even though that loss was caused by his own behaviour. The wife was seen as the property of the husband. Saviour Gauci killed Anna Kok because she ‘interfered’ in his bad marriage to her sister. That other man killed his wife because she left him and filed for separation.
When BondiPlus was broadcast from Corradino Prisons some weeks ago, one of the prisoners on the discussion panel was David Schembri, who in a cocaine-induced frenzy stabbed his child’s mother 50 times and reduced her body to bloody pulp, after breaking open the front door to their flat.
His daughter, who was only seven, saw the whole thing. She saw her father stab her mother 50 times. She saw her mother dying in a lake of blood, before she was carried away by a neighbour who heard the screams. Were his crimes described on BondiPlus? No, they were not – at least not while I was watching.
Instead, all I saw was David Schembri – come se non fosse – talking about how he loves and misses his daughter and how sad he is because she won’t have anything to do with him.
I found myself talking impatiently at the television screen: “Come on. Tell the audience why the girl won’t have anything to do with her father. Might it be because she saw him stab mummy 50 times while she cowered beneath the kitchen sink?” I couldn’t, for the life of me, understand why that fact was not brought up.
I would have liked to have seen the prisoners challenged about the actions that put them in jail, rather than have them wheeled out for their opinions on this and that, which are worth sweet FA to the rest of us. If I want somebody’s opinion, the last person I am going to ask is a man who stabbed a woman 50 times in front of their little daughter.
What I want to know from him is whether he feels any guilt and how he can sleep at night, because to me via that television screen, he looked like a psychopath who has brushed it off completely, maybe even justified it to himself and is now putting his daughter’s maternal family in the wrong for keeping her away from him.
People don’t get sentenced to life in prison for nothing. I really resent that they are paraded before the nation as ‘naughty boys’ – or petty crooks who really have hearts of gold beneath it all and look, here they are offering to serve time for one of their own who is dying of cancer.
If they really did have hearts of gold, they wouldn’t be where they are today, and some people wouldn’t be dead before their time. There was one man who stabbed a woman to death telling us what he thinks on BondiPlus (like anyone gives a flying wotsit), and now we have to put up with all these calls for the early release on compassionate grounds of yet another man who stabbed a woman to death.
I would say it’s unbelievable, but sadly, it’s just normal. Far too many women in this tiny country have died at the hands of enraged men. What next – a call for the early release of that man who burnt his estranged wife’s friend alive in a locked car, should he get cancer too?
He, too, said that he killed the woman because she interfered in his marriage and supported his wife in her decision to leave him.
We’re dealing with a major cultural problem. What men like this need is a stronger lesson and not encouragement and compassion. The compassion, particularly, is completely misdirected.
It should go to their victims, the living and the dead.
This article was published in The Malta Independent last Thursday.
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This charade of permitting convicted persons actually to serve only part of their sentence in prison should be ended once and for all. A suspected person has all the opportunity to try and mitigate the seriousness of his crime in the court room, and normally always gets sentenced for a lesser period than would seem to an unbiased layman. With this system, justice is always the loser. And what is this nonsense of handing out such a bonus for ‘good behaviour’? Rather than crediting convicts for good behaviour, those who still insist on behaving as morons when in jail should have their sentences extended (naturally through a proper judicial process) such that the sentence meted out by the court would be the minimum period that they serve.
Well said! It amazes me how many criminals become victims once they set foot into Corradino and the real victims of their crimes seem to become forgotten and voiceless. The Xarabank team have really stooped to an all time low on this one. I guess there’s nothing controversial left for them to exploit in order to get the attention of hoi polloi. It’s all about ratings, isn’t it?
Daphne my feedback on all articles you’ve written in this blog and in your column (yes I’ve read them ALL):
Many are driven by hatred (justified or not) of the PL. Most of those which do not fall under such category are good. A few are very good. This one … exceptionally well written. especially the last sentence.
I wish a happy new year to you and to all your loved ones.
I agree with the sentiment here, but I was curious to know if you have any data to back up your claim “In this tiny population, a disproportionately large number of women are murdered violently by men”?
I don’t mean to insinuate that it is not a problem in Malta, I have no doubt it is, but it’s a problem everywhere, no? Perhaps in Malta it’s easier to hear about it.
Try:
The two women Daphne mentioned above
Diane Gerada, also stabbed 50 times by her husband while lying in bed with their toddler son. He then poured lavatory cleaner over her wounds as she lay dying.
The woman stabbed to death by her husband while receiving treatment at St Luke’s Hospital a couple of years ago.
The English woman shot dead by her Maltese ex boyfriend at the Greyhound Pub in St Julian’s.
The unidentified Russian woman whose murdered corpse was found floating near the Chalet in Sliema.
The Russian woman thrown out of a St George’s Park balcony and killed, by her Maltese lover.
The teenage Maltese girl who was last seen alive at a decrepit Sliema hotel and whose bound corpse was then dredged up from the seabed.
The woman in Gozo who was flung off a cliff by her husband.
The woman in Gozo who was thrown into a well, and died.
These are just a few.
I’d like statistics. That’s just hearsay. I want to compare numbers of women killed in Malta against say Italy, the UK, France, Sweden, etc.
Very well said! I agree 100%. Did they show any mercy to these poor women? No, so why should we. They want to play the poor victims now too! What cheek!
As I said to my mother when I was in Malta over Christmas, if it’s true that Mr Gauci can’t get to the visitors’ room then arrangements should be made so that he can receive visits in some other location, or the visitors’ room should be equipped with a lift. As to his not wanting to die alone – tough. Better to die alone of natural causes than to be brutally murdered.
Maltese society simply doesn’t get the protection it deserves from the judiciary. This is another in a long series of examples.
The only time you make any sense is when you leave politics out.
Astonishingly well written.
[Daphne – I take your comment to mean that my views make sense only when they converge with yours. The suspicion should perhaps occur to you that if I make sense on everything but politics then perhaps I’m also talking sense about politics but you just can’t see it.]
No, not at all. I do not have any political views, in fact I never pick up my voting document. It’s just that you’re too biased for anyone to take you seriously, which is a pity.
Anyway, have a great new year.
[Daphne – Do you know the definition of opinion? It’s what I’m paid for – my opinion, and not a technical assessment along the lines of ‘all things being equal/on the one hand/on the other hand/hold on a minute while I remove this fence-post from up my butt’. The Labour Party is a bucket of shit, and that’s the considered, unbiased opinion of somebody with a functional brain who wasn’t raised in a Nationalist family. Is Muscat fit to run the country? Come on, let me have your honest answer. If it’s Yes, then you might as well trot down to your local bank, pull one of the junior clerks from behind some random counter, and hand him the keys to Castile and a mandate for five years. Same difference.]
As of yet I do not have an opinion but I promise to give it some thought tonight somewhere in between the 3rd and 4th erotic dream.
This is not really anything to do with your article, but sort-of related:
Is it not ironic that one of the main people seemingly involved in “Victim Support Malta” is none other that Fr Montebello? Is he not the one usually camopaigning for the rights of prisoners/criminals?
Whose side is the man really on?
There is a big difference between wanting to support victims and demanding harsher punishment. While it is true that many victims feel neglected when lenient sentences are being handed out, there are yet many ways to support and help victims.
I’m very much on the same lines as Fr. Montebello here. I think victims need as much support as they can, as well as relatives of victims in cases of death. Yet at the same time I believe staunchly that the welfare of people in prison is a real concern, as sentences are not just about punishment, but also rehabilitation and correction. Emotionally I can be angered by lenient sentences, especially in case of violent crimes, but at the same time I feel the need to be pragmatic about it. A prisoner being sentenced for X years will be a free man once he has served his term. If that man comes out bitter and unchanged, he would pose a danger to all of us. If instead he he leaves prison knowing he has paid his dues, while getting the help he needs to rehabilitate into society, it would be to the benefit of us all.
I’m all in favour of social welfare, I just don’t like paying for it when it is unnecessary, which would be the case of an ex-con unable to get a job.
Strange how everyone wants to be reunited with his family in times of need or distress. Coming from someone who destroyed one family, that’s rich.
Daphne, I think you must have missed chunks of this particular programme. I did confront the prisoners about their crimes, particularly David Schembri. I was in communication with the victim’s father both before and after the programme. He was satisfied with the way I interviewed the man who brutally murdered his daughter in the presence of his grandchild. Obviously, his judgement gave me a lot of comfort in a journalistic situation which I approached with some degree of dread. Furthermore, in a subsequent programme we corrected an impression which Schembri gave on precisely the point you raised. Contrary to Schembri’s claim that his daughter does not see him out of a choice egged on by her mother’s family, she is prohibited from seeing her father on the strength of a court order based on the advice of appointed psychologists.
In the case Alfred Bugeja (Porporina) I repeatedly questioned his sincerity in claiming that he is willing to reform himself. I showed him footage of himself on Pjazza 3 seventeen years ago saying that he would not commit another crime. Then I followed it up with the fact that since then he has been sentenced for five other crimes. I confronted about the fact that drugs have been found in his cell. I ended the programme by facetiously asking him whether I would see him on another Bondiplus in seventeen years time. And so on.
With regards to the other two prisoners, one was a chronic drug addict who has been repeatedly put away for stealing but never trafficking and the other, a Libyan, claimed that in his case there was a miscarriage of justice and he will be instituting a constitutional case.
[Daphne – Thanks for clearing this up.]
@ Josephine – yes Father Montebello, years back, had argued that prisoners should have the RIGHT to go home a couple of times a month to ‘service’ their wives. Mhux hekk!
I agree completely with Daphne. The almost automatic remission of prison terms is scandalous and has resulted in the release after just a few years of convicts like Ali Resaq which horrified the world. Cancer may hit anyone and any would-be murderer, or other criminal for that matter, should take into consideration the possibility of contracting this disease if he is sent to prison BEFORE he commits the crime and not when he is already convicted. If anyone is imprisoned after conviction and then gets cancer – tough luck mate! The offer to serve time by the other inmates in place of Gauci is just a ruse to attract public sympathy to themselves not to Gauci. I’m afraid that even Bondi+ was used by the prisoners in the hope of getting some public sympathy. If I’m not mistaken (I stand to be corrected), a former minister had even stood as witness to Porporina at his wedding after the latter made us shed tears at his “conversion”. I guess the minister must have realized how he had been unscrupulously used and wished he could turn back the clock after Porporina’s later convictions.
You are right. I was invited to this vaguely surreal wedding in prison and the two witnesses were two politicians – Louis Galea and Joe Brincat. Balance rules even in prison :)
I had forgotten Brincat – thanks for reminding me. What goes for one witness obviously applies to the other. Yes, balance was necessary in case the wedding had to be televized – one must keep in mind the possibility of MBA sanctions as you well know.