AG office backs prosecutors, not answers

The Attorney General’s office has responded to mounting criticism after two failed murder prosecutions by defending its own prosecutors and saying it will keep improving how serious cases are prepared.

In comments reported by Times of Malta, the office said it had confidence in the “professionalism and commitment” of its prosecutors and pointed to training, including advocacy training, as part of its professional development strategy. It added that it would continue to strengthen the preparation and prosecution of serious cases.

That is a public institution choosing its lane carefully: solidarity first, explanation later, if at all. The difficulty is that the cases in question are not administrative mishaps. One jury cleared Lorin Scicluna of the murder of Lassana Cisse and of the attempted murders of two other men. Another jury cleared Yorgen Fenech of involvement in the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia. In the same period, a separate jury acquitted a man charged with raping his daughter’s friend when she was 13.

Three acquittals do not prove one single flaw. Juries can reject a case for different reasons. But three emphatic verdicts in serious trials naturally shift attention from the accused to the state’s preparation. In court, confidence is not measured by the press office. It is measured by what a jury can be sure of after hearing the prosecution’s case.

The office declined to discuss the evidence in the Cisse case while proceedings remain ongoing. That caution is legitimate. It also left unanswered the most consequential question raised by the Cisse prosecution itself: why the case was split.

According to Times of Malta, prosecutors chose to try Scicluna separately from Francesco Fenech, who is also charged over Cisse’s murder. The paper said it asked the office why that decision was taken, whether it remained confident of securing a conviction against Fenech, and what would happen if Scicluna refused to testify. The office did not answer those questions, citing the ongoing proceedings.

That silence matters because a split trial is not a clerical detail. It changes the room. It changes what a jury hears together, what gets tested in one sequence instead of two, and what risk the prosecution accepts if the first verdict goes against it. In a small country, legal process often appears to the public as ceremony until one procedural decision suddenly becomes the whole story. This may be one of those moments.

Nationalist MP Mark Anthony Sammut called the defeats unprecedented and accused Attorney General Victoria Buttigieg of having weakened the office by losing experienced lawyers and leaving a deputy Attorney General post vacant. Those are political claims, not established findings, and the office’s published reply did not address them directly.

What it did offer was institutional reassurance. That has its place. But in a case where one man has been acquitted and another still faces trial over the same killing, reassurance is thinner than explanation. Lassana Cisse was killed in 2019. Seven years later, the public question is no longer only whether prosecutors work hard. It is whether the decisions made before a jury is sworn are giving them enough to work with.