I see. Fair enough.

I disagree on the assertion that a jacket wouldn’t come off in a struggle.

I’ve seen jumpers and t-shirts pulled over peoples’ heads in real altercations.

However, in these situations, the person doing the pulling doesn’t want the item of clothing to clear the head (this gives you an advantage because the person’s view is obscured and it entangles the arms), whereas the other person’s instinctive reaction is to lower their head and torso and pull back, removing the item of clothing over their head inside out.

This is a plausible scenario if they struggled on the cliff edge, but the jacket would have come off inside out. Definitely possible.

[Daphne – It really isn’t possible to get a jacket off somebody in a struggle. Try it. You can’t even get one off a toddler who doesn’t want it off. The arms lock it into place. Jumpers and T-shirts get tugged off because they stretch, so even if the wearer ‘locks’ his arms by crossing them, the other person can still tug it off by raising the back,]

Daphne, your analysis, so far, seems to be the most reliable. I only hope that the investigators out there are following.

In both cases, suicide and homicide, the victim must be dead.

The thing is that if he is found guilty of having assisted a suicide, in which case the victim died by committing suicide, then he cannot also be found guilty of wilful homicide (‘murder’ is not a term used under Maltese criminal law) because the victim cannot have been killed twice.

Researching the history of crime is in no way connected to the application and practice of criminal law. It is a narration of events as derived from material, like court judgments and media of the day.

From personal experience I can say fluently, assertively that such reporting can at times be as misleading as quoting the sun for being the moon.

In modern jurisprudence there has been admitted the fact that one can have a conviction for murder without having the corpse of the murdered person. This has been adopted in our courts and in history we have a case in question.

For a criminal charge to subsist there are three elements that have to be proven: 1. the mens rea, the “mind” the thought of the crime, 2. the actus reus, that is the criminal act itself, and 3. the corpus delicti, that is the victim of the crime.

All three elements together constitute the duty of proof of the offence, though as stated earlier in certain particular circumstances murder could be proven without having the corpus delicti.

Let us assume they both considered suicide. They were consonant on the intent, the execution of the attempt of suicide by the lethal mix of whiskey and pills, and the final outcome. At one point in time they decide they wanted a swifter exit and decide to leap off the cliff.

At the edge one of them is pushed off. This is where an attempt and abetting of suicide is accompanied by the murder of the other. Easier said than proven. There is no doubt that up to and including a certain point in time there was an attempt on suicide and one of the two was actively assisting and abetting in the suicide of the other. The fact that he was intent to commit his suicide does not in any way exculpate him.

What happened at the edge of the cliff is a vital clue as what charge should prevail. Up to the edge of the cliff there is prima facie the offence of assisting in suicide. If at the edge of the cliff one of the two was pushed over, then we have murder only because the one thrown off the cliff died. Otherwise had she survived it would have been attempted murder.

This is where forensic evidence comes into play. This is one of the tough nuts to crack in this process.

It does not mean that he cannot be charged with both, one being an alternative to the other.

As I said earlier, had the accused to be charged with only one of the two crimes and he is not convicted, the rule of double jeopardy would forbid another trial on a charge of another crime arising out of the same circumstances.

For wilful homicide to subsist, there must be the intention (mens rea) of committing wilful homicide. One may have intended to assist in a suicide and then changed one’s mind at the last moment and decided to commit wilful homicide but, in that case, the necessary intention of wilful homicide will be present.

In my opinion the police and the Attorney General agreed to include both the charge of assisting to commit suicide and the charge of wilful homicide in the indictment because they were not sure which of the two contradictory charges would work.

I think they were in a dilemma and chose what seemed to them a way out to obtain a conviction on either one of the two charges: had they included only one of the two and that one did not work out, then it would have been impossible to charge the accused with the other crime because of the rule of double jeopardy.

Had they charged the accused with wilful homicide only and this charge failed, the rule of double jeopardy would have become operative because they could not have charged him with another crime arising from the same circumstances. On the basis of the same circumstances, a person can only be charged once even if the crime is not exactly the same one.

I am pretty sure this is the one possible explanation for the two contradictory charges.

[Daphne – It would be murder in any case, because of the adult-minor context. That is the point we are overlooking. If a 15-year-old came to me and asked for help in killing herself, and I gave her a huge quantity of pills then drove her to the cliffs, that would technically be murder, not suicide. The context does not change because Erin Tanti is 23 and I am 49. We are both adults in the eyes of the law. And that is why I really cannot understand why he has been charged with assisting a suicide rather than with outright murder.]