JURORS HELD HOSTAGE BY A PROSECUTION WITH SELECTIVE VISION
By Maltese Canadian
Imagine being summoned as a juror in Malta. The case lasts 55 days. Police and court ushers guard every step. They escort you to a hotel each night. You cannot go home. The judge leaves. The police finish their shift and leave. You stay locked in the “bubble”.
Phones are taken at once. Laptops, tablets and smartwatches go too. Social media vanishes. There is no scrolling, no messages from friends, no ordinary window on the world. Court-issued tablets show only evidence. Hotel televisions offer a handful of channels. The isolation is complete.
Now suppose the evidence points to three men at the top of a gang. The prosecution appears determined to jail only one. The other two are shielded. Anger would rise. Many people would vote to free the accused. That reaction would not be madness. Psychology predicts it.
Psychological reactance, first described by Jack Brehm, explains the impulse. When authority strips away freedom, people push back. They want what has been forbidden. Cutting jurors off from social media sharpens that effect. Daily life now runs on those networks. Removing them is not a small inconvenience. It is a further loss of autonomy—the mind rebels. Frustration grows. In a 1977 mock-jury experiment, Wolf and Montgomery found that a strong judicial order to ignore certain evidence made jurors more, not less, influenced by it, as they tried to reclaim the freedom to think for themselves. Later work by Horowitz and by Niedermeier, Horowitz and Kerr showed that mock jurors given room to treat a verdict as a moral choice were more willing to acquit when a strict application of the law felt unjust. Jurors may treat a not-guilty vote as the only power they still possess.
Malta sequesters juries. The 55-day Yorgen Fenech case, linked to the murder of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, showed how long that isolation can last. Relatives later spoke of tears, exasperation and a sense of being cut off.
Other countries treat jurors differently. In England and Wales, jurors normally go home after each sitting. They receive strict instructions not to research the case or discuss it. The same practice applies in most trials in the United States, Canada and Australia. Full sequestration is rare. Even then it is often limited to deliberations.
Malta’s small size is cited as the reason for the hotel regime. Yet the contrast remains stark. The judge returns to family life. Court staff clock off. Ordinary citizens chosen at random live under guard for weeks. They eat the same meals. Their calls are supervised. They wait without the digital ties that keep most adults sane.
A system that confines jurors, strips them of social media and allows everyone else to leave invites resentment. If those jurors also conclude that the prosecution has chosen its target and protected others, anger is the expected human response. Courts exist to try the evidence, not to test how long citizens can endure captivity and digital silence.
Nobody has worked as hard as Professor Simon Mercieca, the owner of this blog, to alert everyone to the irregularities and nonsense in the Fenech case. In his own words, “For years, I was attacked — and even sued for libel — for questioning the procedures followed in the case against Yorgen Fenech. I was labelled a ‘mafia professor’ merely because I challenged the official narrative and defended Fenech’s right to a fair trial… I also repeatedly questioned… whether the Office of the Attorney General handled the prosecution fairly and competently… I publicly criticised the former Attorney General, Philip Galea Farrugia. He accused me during the inquiry of terrorising him and asked Magistrate Rachel Montebello to institute proceedings against me. Proceedings were indeed taken, but after a long legal journey, I was cleared of the accusations made against me.”
Philip Galea Farrugia, a man with a narrow focus, was rewarded by our chief justice and appointed a magistrate. The justice system is broken. As Professor Mercieca put it, “legitimate questions of profound public importance…. should have been investigated and debated, not silenced through personal attacks and legal proceedings.” Whoever replaces Philip Galea Farrugia failed to prove his case in court. The office of the attorney general should initiate a study of how larger jurisdictions in other countries keep juries impartial without locking them away.
The way the jurors were treated is a disgrace. They were interned just like Herbert Ganado, “Nerik” Mizzi and about 120 Italophile, Catholic, and Nationalist persons were interned during the Second World War.
The lack of trust in the jurors was unwarranted and despicable. It was arbitrary and capricious. The state should fully compensate them for two months of false imprisonment. They fulfilled their duty under horrendous conditions.