A 46-year-old cleaner convicted of stealing jewellery from two homes has been given a three-year conditional discharge, after a prison sentence imposed in the same case was annulled over a defect in the court record.
Newsbook reports that Seliam Ann Elbueshi Perry had admitted to two charges of aggravated theft. One concerned a ring and other items taken from an apartment in Msida between September and October 2017. The other concerned jewellery and belongings stolen from a flat in Tas-Sliema between December 2017 and March 2018.
She had admitted the charges in December 2018 and was sentenced to three years in prison. That did not hold. In September 2023, the Court of Criminal Appeal annulled the sentence after finding a serious irregularity in the judgment document: a date marked as May 2019 had been crossed out and replaced by a handwritten date, 2 November 2021, without court records showing that the correction had been properly authorised.
That is the kind of detail people outside courtrooms are often told to treat as technical. The appeal court did the opposite. According to Newsbook’s report, it said the date of a judgment is an essential part of the act itself, because it fixes when the time for appeal starts running and when the legal effects of a conviction begin. A crossed-out date is not a smudge on the margins when liberty is attached to the page.
The criminal proceedings remained intact, and the case went back to the Magistrates’ Court for sentencing alone. When it returned before Magistrate Astrid May Grima, Perry was warned again about the consequences of her admissions and given time to reconsider before re-admitting the charges.
The new outcome was markedly different from the first one. The magistrate considered a pre-sentencing report, the passage of several years since the offences, Perry’s regular employment and the return of some of the stolen items. On that basis, the court found her guilty on both charges but decided against imprisonment, granting a conditional discharge for three years instead.
That leaves a plain question about who bears the weight of procedural disorder. The thefts were admitted. The conviction survived. What changed the practical result was not a new dispute about guilt but an administrative flaw inside the machinery of judgment, followed by the court’s later view that the woman’s circumstances had stabilised. For the victims, the record still says theft. For the defendant, the difference between prison and no prison turned on whether a court document was properly dated and then on how much of a life can change while a case waits to be put back in order.
Malta’s courts often speak grandly about principle. Here the principle sat inside a scratched-out date.
Harvey Jr. 
Ryan C 
Alex de Valletta