You know what they say: the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Sometimes, people can be misguided and nonsensical in their compassion – if it is compassion at all, and not just a publicity-seeking exercise.

I don’t like the calls for the early release from prison of Saviour Gauci, who was sent down for 20 years for stabbing and killing his wife’s sister on a busy street. Make that ‘even earlier release’ rather than ‘early release’: what with time off for good behaviour and the usual rot, he has had several years knocked off that sentence already – more than a third.

Those who are campaigning right now to have him let out of prison immediately are doing so because he has terminal cancer and has been given only a short while to live. To which my reaction is: so what? The fact that he has cancer now changes neither the circumstances of the case – that he attacked his sister-in-law and killed her – nor the circumstances of his sentencing. What are we arguing here – that murderers with cancer are deserving of special treatment? That prisoners have the right to die at home rather than in prison, even if they are serving a sentence? With that line of reasoning, anyone over the age of 80 can commit murder safe in the knowledge that he won’t be sent to prison because he might die there.

There’s been a lot of blather about forgiveness. But it is not up to us to forgive for we were not at the receiving end of the crime. And for that matter, this has nothing to do with forgiveness. Forgiveness is a personal thing. It is not the business of the state. The state’s responsibility is to ensure that murderers are caught, prosecuted, found guilty (if they are so) and suitably punished in accordance with the law.

The people who are in a position to forgive Gauci for murdering Anna Kok, a Maltese woman who was married to a Dutch man, are her widower and her son. Both of them are adamant that Gauci should serve his sentence, even if it means that he dies in prison. Mr Kok was horrified to discover, when he was interviewed by a newspaper, that Gauci will serve far less than those 20 years. “It can’t be possible,” he said. But it is possible, and it is true.

Mr Kok described how his life was ruined when his wife was murdered. “I wake up with it and go to sleep with it,” he said. His son, who was 13 at the time, still can’t come to terms with the loss, in such a dreadful way, of his mother – and this was made worse, he told a journalist, by the fact that Saviour Gauci was his favourite uncle. So there are enormous loss-of-trust issues here, too.

Possibly egged on by the campaigners, other prisoners have offered to serve the remainder of Gauci’s sentence. Those who are encouraging them to do this are silly and irresponsible. They must know, even if some prisoners don’t (or pretend not to) that prison sentences cannot be transferred to third parties. The reason should be obvious, as one lawyer told a reporter – did the newspaper have to ask about something so basic, for heaven’s sake? If you can transfer a sentence, then you can transfer it in a variety of situations. Parents would serve sentences instead of their children, or vice versa. The rich would pay the poor and desperate to serve a sentence on their behalf. And on it would go.

But there’s another reason why the ‘release Saviour Gauci’ campaigners are terribly irresponsible. They have failed to consider the nature of his crime, and its particular significance in Malta. In this tiny population, a disproportionately large number of women are murdered violently by men. Almost no men are murdered by women, even though it is usually women who are provoked and mistreated beyond the limits of endurance. Just a short while ago, a woman was stabbed to death in the street just like Anna Kok, as she got off a bus after working to put food on the table for her children, because her estranged husband refused to do so. Only this time, the killer was her husband and not her brother-in-law. The reason, however, was similar: anger at the loss of his wife, even though that loss was caused by his own behaviour. The wife was seen as the property of the husband. Saviour Gauci killed Anna Kok because she ‘interfered’ in his bad marriage to her sister. That other man killed his wife because she left him and filed for separation.

When BondiPlus was broadcast from Corradino Prisons some weeks ago, one of the prisoners on the discussion panel was David Schembri, who in a cocaine-induced frenzy stabbed his child’s mother 50 times and reduced her body to bloody pulp, after breaking open the front door to their flat. His daughter, who was only seven, saw the whole thing. She saw her father stab her mother 50 times. She saw her mother dying in a lake of blood, before she was carried away by a neighbour who heard the screams. Were his crimes described on BondiPlus? No, they were not – at least not while I was watching. Instead, all I saw was David Schembri – come se non fosse – talking about how he loves and misses his daughter and how sad he is because she won’t have anything to do with him.

I found myself talking impatiently at the television screen: “Come on. Tell the audience why the girl won’t have anything to do with her father. Might it be because she saw him stab mummy 50 times while she cowered beneath the kitchen sink?” I couldn’t, for the life of me, understand why that fact was not brought up. I would have liked to have seen the prisoners challenged about the actions that put them in jail, rather than have them wheeled out for their opinions on this and that, which are worth absolutely nothing to the rest of us. If I want somebody’s opinion, the last person I am going to ask is a man who stabbed a woman 50 times in front of their little daughter. What I want to know from him is whether he feels any guilt and how he can sleep at night, because to me via that television screen, he looked like a sociopath who has brushed it off completely, maybe even justified it to himself, and who is now putting his daughter’s maternal family in the wrong for keeping her away from him.

People don’t get sentenced to life in prison for nothing. I really resent that they are paraded before the nation as ‘naughty boys’ – or petty crooks who really have hearts of gold beneath it all and, look, here they are offering to serve time for one of their own who is dying of cancer.

If they really did have hearts of gold, they wouldn’t be where they are today, and some people wouldn’t be dead before their time. There was one man who stabbed a woman to death telling us what he thinks on BondiPlus (like anyone gives a flying wotsit), and now we have to put up with all these calls for the early release on compassionate grounds of yet another man who stabbed a woman to death.

I would say it’s unbelievable, but sadly, it’s just normal. Far too many women in this tiny country have died at the hands of enraged men. What next – a call for the early release of that man who burnt his estranged wife’s friend alive in a locked car, should he get cancer too? He, too, said that he killed the woman because she interfered in his marriage and supported his wife in her decision to leave him.

We’re dealing with a major cultural problem. What men like this need is a stronger lesson and not encouragement and compassion. The compassion, particularly, is completely misdirected. It should go to their victims, the living and the dead.

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