Not shutting up

Yorgen Fenech’s defence team — Lawyers Giannella de Marco, Charles Mercieca and Gianluca Caruana Curran — have associated themselves with a statement threatening legal action if what are called “baseless allegations” continue to be made.

Forgive me if I fail to piss my pants.

The statement, or at least the parts of it that I could be bothered to look at, does not identify with much detail (I wonder why) the allegedly defamatory statements, or even the people who made them, much. It simply waves the words “legal action” in the general direction of everyone who dares to remain unconvinced by the verdict.

Speaking for myself, I will continue to give due respect to the jury’s verdict.  You know how it is when lawyers preface their remarks with ’’with all due respect’’, so yes, Yorgen Fenech was acquitted and is therefore not guilty in law of the charges brought against him, with all due respect, Your Honour.

That does not oblige me to surrender my faculties of observation, memory or expression, if I choose to exercise them.  Nor does it require me to pretend that the acquittal magically erased everything heard in open court.

Having considered the evidence placed in the public domain, I remain free to form and express my own opinion about what that evidence shows. I remain free to form the opinion that the verdict leaves me profoundly unconvinced and that it did not make the evidence, the admissions or the unanswered questions disappear.

Did you clock that, dear colleagues?

Drs de Marco, Mercieca and Caruana Curran, you may disagree. You may say that if I dared to express an opinion on those lines, I would be wrong, unreasonable or blinded by animosity. You may explain again how the verdict was “practically unanimous”, as though repetition transforms a jury’s conclusion into a prohibition on public thought.

What you cannot do, however, is demand of me that I will regard your client’s acquittal as a judicially imposed vow of silence.

The verdict determined criminal liability in this particular prosecution. It did not rewrite history. It did not expunge the recordings, testimony, messages, relationships, payments, attempted yacht trip or the extraordinary web of political protection surrounding this case. It does not force me to expunge from my mind this nagging question I have: for what was Fenech asking to be pardoned?

It does not, either, compel me to reach the same conclusion as eight jurors, though traditionally in Malta 8 = 9 in these circumstances.

It would be amusing, were it not Trumpian in its sheer arrogance, that the position taken by learned counsel betrays the fact that they themselves appear to suffer no comparable inhibitions about shooting their mouths off.

Their statement attacks the prosecution, the prosecution lawyers, the parte civile lawyers, the police investigation and, with quite breathtaking insensitivity, Daphne’s family for its “inexplicable persistence” in refusing to accept their client’s account of her assassination.

Apparently, everybody may be accused of incompetence, corruption or wilful blindness — provided the accusations issue from the correct chambers and do not besmirch the good name of their client, heroic as he is feeling after defeating the State, if Dr De Marco will forgive my plagiarising the comment she made as she strode triumphant out of court on that night.

If I choose to, I will continue asking what conclusions may reasonably be drawn from the evidence placed in the public domain or that might yet enter the public domain.

I will not describe an acquitted man as guilty, but nor will his defence team dictate to me that an acquittal requires intellectual amnesia. Dr Giannella de Marco, Dr Charles Mercieca and Dr Gianluca Caruana Curran, you know where to find me if your client wants to serve me with a writ for daring to point out that I retain freedom of thought and expression in this country.