Leave All Hope Behind

The most commented news item on the Times website in the past week was the report of a female traffic warden cleared of a charge of posing naked in public. The comments reveal that some of us are not as batty as our legal system. All of them pour scorn on this prosecution.

It all adds spice to our next traffic fine since we can now speculate that we are being penalized by a wannabe porn star. Withholding her name from publication only adds mystery and possibly infuriates more of her colleagues who may not be as inclined to display their birthday suits.

Pity that my latest day in court was not so amusing. I was there on a rare visit as counsel to a witness in a prosecution of a bar owner for playing infernally loud music in the small hours of the morning. It meant that I heard all other loud music cases bundled together for that morning’s sitting.

It was a rout for the prosecution. In every case a Malta Tourism Authority official swore that according to the license conditions in his file these people had no permit to disturb the neighbourhood. The Police also raised the general rule against loud noises after 11.00 pm. Then defence raised the issue of the original licenses issued by the police a record of which may not have been transferred to the MTA. A minute doubt was sown that these establishments may somehow have been given a permit sometime in the past.

They were all acquitted. It seemed like nonsense to me. The court made monkeys of the police. The neighbours who had plucked up courage to report the Mafiosi who run these joints had been thrown out of court more naked than our beloved warden. Will they ever try again? Will the police waste their time again?

The court claims to be powerless. The police are impotent and the site neighbours are mocked by the system. Some clever dick somewhere has figured a way to sabotage almost any prosecution by ensuring that the MTA records cannot be certified as complete. In this way the system appears to work or grind its way slowly forward through reports at police stations and appearances in court but in fact nothing will ever be done to address neighbours’ complaints. The mysterious operator of the system has figured out a way to give everybody a non-answer and to keep the Mafiosi more than satisfied.

My client has made the mistake of buying a flat for Lm85,000 over the neighbours from hell. There is no way out.