This week brought the latest in a series of sad and anger-inducing injustices.

In April 2020, young man Matteo Grima was out jogging when he was seriously injured after being hit by a car. He suffered serious head injuries, and fell into 2-week coma, before making an inspirational recovery.

Last Monday, Raymond Camilleri was acquitted of all charges after the Court concluded that the charges were time-barred.

Matteo Grima, who is now 22 years old, publicly shared his frustration after the judgment. Expressing his disappointment, he described what happened to him as a new level of shame.

“This is justice…a failed and false system where people can do whatever they please,” Grima wrote.

“To drop a criminal case simply because over two years have passed since the incident is the biggest farce I have ever heard,” he added, “and what blame do I have that the incompetent Maltese court summoned the accused just last year and not earlier?”

And who can blame Grima’s anger?  This is a young man whose life has been inalterably changed by the incident of that day, and he has been effectively chewed up and spat out by a justice system that appears to offer everything except justice itself.

It is certainly not the first time that we have seen Malta’s justice system serve as an injustice in and of itself. 

There have been cases which are dragged out by years – decades even – leaving both the accused and any victim there may be in a near permanent sense of limbo. 

Other cases have been bungled by the prosecution: we can look at the case brought against lawyers Gianluca Caruana Curran and Charles Mercieca for allegedly trying to bribe a journalist, which was dropped after the Attorney General referred to the wrong article in her referral.

There have been others bungled by the police: The Malta Independent on Sunday recently reported on the case of Mark Vassallo who was killed while he was riding his motorcycle, and where the man charged with involuntarily causing his death through negligent driving was acquitted because of a host of mistakes made in the police’s charge sheet.

The model of the car was listed as a Volkswagen, when in fact, it was a Peugeot. The number plate was registered wrong and the police wrote that the accident happened at 1.30am in Triq Dun Karm, Msida, when in fact it happened at 7.30am in Triq ix-Xatt, Pietà. 

In other cases, families like the Sofias and the Rizzo Naudis need to mount mass campaigns in the media and, in the former cases, protests in order to at least gain some closure on what happened to their loved ones.

The more cases like these occur, the more need there is for total reform to the justice sector, together with a clean out of those who should not be there.  Otherwise, these rampant injustices will continue to happen, and the justice system will continue to fail the people it is meant to serve.