Good thing he has two personalities: he needs one for each side of the fence
Look at this business with Franco. In parliament he rages against the minister of home affairs and demands (and how has secured) his resignation for, among other things, failing to close this loophole in the law.
And in court, he uses the loophole to the advantage of his clients.
timesofmalta.com reports:
A man jailed for being an accomplice in the murder of Nazzareno Ebejer in 1989 has claimed breach of human rights because he was not accompanied by a lawyer when his police statement was taken.
George Pace, 55, had been jailed for 30 years.
He had filed an appeal which confirmed his guilt. This morning he filed the Constitutional application.
Lawyer Franco Debono said that the problem that his client had not been accompanied by a lawyer was compounded by the fact that he had a very low IQ and was illiterate. This had a direct effect on his answers in the statement.
Moreover, he had been taken to court 15 years after the crime.
Lawyer Marion Camilleri also signed the application.
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Dr. Franco Jekyll and Mr. Debono Hyde.
It’s suck and blow time with Frankie l-Qahba.
Michael Refalo on yesterday’s The Times of Malta:
“Now for the rub. Some weeks ago, the Labour leader paid a visit to the Libyan capital, which remains in part shrouded in mystery. It was not Dr Muscat’s first visit to Tripoli.
In a letter sent on May 9, 2008 (coincidentally after the time Mr Cachia Caruana is alleged to have bypassed Parliament), former Labour minister Noel Farrugia informed a “Dr Salem Sagri” that he (Mr Farrugia) was authorised by all the Labour leadership contestants and Labour’s parliamentary group to request him (Dr Sagri) to make the necessary arrangements for a “first introductory meeting” between Labour’s new leader and “the Glorious Leader of the Great Libyan Jamahirija in order to enhance our special relationship”.
Mr Farrugia added that “Contestant Joseph Muscat has agreed that if he should be elected leader I will be the MLP spokesperson for all Africa with responsibility to create relations with African leaders. Of course, this would give me the opportunity to make a very special relationship with the Great Libyan Jamahirijah. An absolute first priority will be a meeting with the Great Leader of Libyan Revolution Colonel Muhammar El Gaddafi”.
Need I say more?”
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20120601/opinion/Relations-links-and-leaks.422265
If Franco wasn’t around THIS would have been a headline.
Are you sure he only has two personalities? He may have up to six or eight. We already know he has the form 2 schoolboy personality showing off his school report grades.
I wonder which personality comes to the fore when he is with his hundreds of caged birds?
People should stop assuming that Carm is a nice guy. They make this assumption because he smiles a lot, is soft spoken and has ‘values’. These are the values that ignorant people associate with goodness such as going to mass everyday, having a doting wife and burdening his children with the names of two obscure Catholic saints.
Labour in the 80s were truly horrible when it came to human rights. The police depot was as frightening as room 101 in Orwell’s 1984 as even if you were innocent you never knew what they would do to you. Carm, unlike the labour monsters, has a background, a heritage so he knows exactly what respect of human rights should mean. That is why I find it even more unacceptable that it was he who did not allow suspects access to a lawyer even after the law was approved by parliament.
Well if you spend a good part of the day consorting with criminals, some of their brand of morality is bound to rub off onto you, especially if your moral backbone wasn’t very strong to begin with.
Good criminal lawyers manage to rise above that, but maybe that’s because they’re good men to begin with. And frankly, pardon the pun, if Franco is good at anything its not really the lawyering, its sales and advertising, although his marketing is a little screwed up.
This is really just a cry for help. If he brings down the government, he knows that Joe Cassar will be available to see patients again. He just can’t decide between losing his soap box and getting himself a good doctor.
The morally acceptable role for a lawyer who defends a criminal is to ensure that his client is not punished for a crime that he did not commit nor that he would receive a sentence more severe than that prescribed by law.
Identifiable technical problems should be removed and the suspect tried properly because he had not been really imperilled by the origibal erroneous charges and he would not have been put in double jeopardy.
It is sheer hypocrisy to diagnose technical invalidating mistakes and at the same time quote those errors of procedure as an adequate reason for letting criminals loose on society.
Franco wants to extend court cases to the third stage, a strictly technical review of the appeal. He thinks he’d be quite good at that, obviously inspired by the Italian legal system.
What he fails to mention, is that Italian legislation introduced a number of instruments to accelerate the criminal court’s procedures, harsher penalties for organised crime, and a system where suspects are incentivised to admit their guilt. Cooperation with investigating magistrates, linking to other related cases and help in prosecuting drug dealing and money laundering, has led to the demise of criminal organisations.
They want to take the same regime to white collar crime, financial fraud, tax evasion and embezzlement.
This git is just a second rate lawyer with a penchant for football, why he thinks he’s so avant garde is beyond me.
Debono does have two personalities, one for each side of the fence.
Hence his persistent sore crotch.