UPDATED/There is a strong argument to be made for compassion. The alternative would be sadism.

UPDATE/This was the case in which Godfrey Ellul was jailed for 20 years. Read it and note that he was with another person, known only as XY, whose name could not be published by order of the court – which means s/he was not sent to trial. This was the ‘I thought it was emeralds’ case, in which he was found not guilty. The law was changed after that landmark case, making it an inadmissible defence for drug mules to claim that they did not know what they were carrying.

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All my regular readers know what my views are about dangerous illegal drugs and the people who traffic, smuggle and sell them. But in this particular case I think there is a strong argument to be made for compassion.

Godfrey Ellul was always the archetypal crazy nofs ras from your typical Sliema family (there were several of them in that generation and in mine, a generation later) rather than an evil psychopath. He was an addict himself for years, destroying his own life, which is how he ended up in prison while others who smuggled and dealt with him, and who he smuggled and dealt for, are running around scot free.

Yes, he deserved his prison sentence, and how – and Judge Noel Arrigo deserved to go to prison himself for standing as a character witness in his favour during another trial in which he was found not guilty of carrying cocaine into Malta in a suitcase (the notorious “I thought it was emeralds” case), but he eventually did that in another drugs-related case anyway.

The point I am making here is that Ellul has clearly suffered enough – unlike, for example, Meinrad Calleja, who was sentenced to 15 years for truly serious cocaine-trafficking (and he was the mastermind, not a mule like Ellul) but who was let out of jail years earlier, for some reason, and also allowed out to go to university and left to roam around the campus unguarded.

There really is nothing to be gained through letting Ellul die in prison. In my view, that would constitute sadism. He has been punished, severely, and there is no way now he would go back to smuggling and dealing.

His sister Betta has, possibly, suffered most of all, clearly feeling responsible and protective towards her brother in the absence of anyone else to do so – those who, like me, knew the circumstances of the family will understand – and, as I recall, even selling her house to help pay his legal and court fees. My heart goes out to her in her sorrow. She has never defended his behaviour.