A Constitutional Court has ordered the Police Commissioner to pay €150 in compensation to Darryl Luke Borg after finding that his rights were breached when he was not immediately and unconditionally released from custody after another person admitted to the crime he was accused of.

But the court concluded that Mr Borg had not been wrongfully arrested or arraigned, agreeing that there had been reasonable suspicion that he had committed the crime in the first place.

The hold-up in question took place at The Convenience Shop in Birkirkara on 4 August, 2013. Only one man was involved in the hold-up, which was recorded on CCTV.

Mr Borg was arrested two days later and arraigned by Inspectors Joseph Mercieca and Carlos Cordina from the Criminal Investigation Department the following day. He pleaded not guilty, and a request for bail was denied.

On 9 August, however, Birkirkara district inspector Elton Taliana arraigned another man, Roderick Grech, over the same crime. Mr Grech admitted to the hold-up – even supplying the balaclava and the toy plastic gun he used to carry it out – and was sentenced to a 12-month jail term suspended for two years.

Mr Borg was released on bail against a personal guarantee hours later, before a magistrate exonerated him of all charges on August 12.

The case had been a source of political controversy, particularly after a police board report laid the blame on Insp. Taliana, recommending that he should disciplinary and possibly even criminal proceedings. The Nationalist Party had been highly critical of this development, with MP Jason Azzopardi describing it as a travesty of justice.

But an internal police inquiry published earlier this year found that Insp. Taliana, had acted according to procedure, and that disciplinary measures should be taken against the two CID inspectors, although it also noted that their “exemplary” record should be taken into consideration.

Meanwhile, Mr Borg sought compensation for his wrongful arrest.

His lawyers David Camilleri and Joseph Gatt had argued that their client’s arrest could not have been justified on the basis of a reasonable suspicion that he had carried out the crime. They said that there were various reasons for this, including the CCTV footage itself, which showed that the hold-up had been carried out by a short man: Mr Borg is considerably taller than Mr Grech.

During questioning, Mr Borg had been confronted with the CCTV footage, and when he denied his involvement in the crime, the police questioned whether he was accusing them of manipulating the footage.

But on June 2014, the First Hall of the Civil Court dismissed his claims, prompting a constitutional appeal.

In the appeal, Dr Camilleri and Dr Gatt argued that the first court had wrongly interpreted the law, reiterated that Mr Borg’s arrest could never have been justified and questioned the court’s apparent conclusion that the police’s discretion in such matters could not be subject to its scrutiny.

They also argued that the fact that the validity of Mr Borg’s arrest was not contested during his arraignment could not be held against him, as at the time, the defence did not know what evidence was in the prosecution’s hands.

The Police Commissioner, on his part, argued that the police had a reasonable suspicion that Mr Borg was involved for various reasons, including the inspectors’ “moral conviction” that he was the one caught on CCTV, Mr Borg’s criminal record, his lack of an alibi and the fact that the accused’s path to and from the shop was consistent with that of someone who lived in Mr Borg’s neighbourhood.

The Constitutional Court, presided over by Chief Justice Silvio Camilleri, Mr Justice Giannino Caruana Demajo and Mr Justice Noel Cuschieri, ultimately ruled that there was reasonable suspicion that Mr Borg was involved, and that his arrest had not been arbitrary. Neither did the court find any wrongdoing in the fact that Mr Borg was held under arrest until his arraignment, and in the arraignment itself.

But the judges noted that once Mr Grech had admitted to the crime Mr Borg was accused of committing, the prosecution clearly no longer had any reasonable suspicion that Mr Borg was involved, and that consequently, Mr Borg should have been unconditionally released from custody with immediate effect, and not simply released on bail until proceedings were extinguished three days later.

They thus ruled that the restrictions on Mr Borg’s liberty between Mr Grech’s conviction and his own acquittal were in breach of the provisions protecting people from arbitrary arrest included in the Constitution and in the European Convention on Human Rights.

The judges observed that Mr Borg did not suffer any pecuniary damages as a result of the arrest, but was nevertheless entitled to compensation for the breach of his human rights, before awarding him €150.