Repubblika Targets Juror Chat Fallout

Repubblika has condemned reports that a juror in the Yorgen Fenech trial wrote “not even her children mourn her” in a WhatsApp chat with fellow jurors, arguing that the message turns a suspicion many people already held into a documented question about how impartial the process was.

According to Newsbook, the message was found by police and was posted hours before thousands marched in Valletta against the 2 September verdict that acquitted Fenech by eight votes to one. The prosecution had alleged that Fenech ordered and financed the €150,000 car bomb plot that killed Daphne Caruana Galizia in October 2017.

The point here is not only that the remark was coarse. Jurors in such a case were specifically asked to declare hostile public posts or other material that could show prior prejudice. Newsbook reported that the juror who allegedly wrote the message had been investigated for failing to declare negative social media posts about the case and about Caruana Galizia. It also reported that two other jurors had shared hostile material, including one opposing compensation for her family, while a reserve juror had written that he could not stand the sight of her face.

That moves the matter from bad taste into procedure. A criminal jury is one of the few places where the state asks ordinary citizens to carry extraordinary power in private. If people with settled animus entered that room despite a screening process designed to detect it, the damage is not confined to one verdict. It reaches the machinery that was meant to reassure the public that the verdict, whatever it was, had been reached fairly.

Repubblika said the revelations gave a “more concrete and frightening meaning” to the climate of impunity identified by the public inquiry into Caruana Galizia’s assassination. That inquiry concluded that the state had created a culture of impunity that facilitated the murder. Repubblika’s argument is broader than the behaviour of one juror: that accountability cannot stop at the edge of a chat thread if public officials helped normalise hatred in the years that mattered.

It plans a protest outside Parliament on 16 October, ending at the Law Courts. The immediate question is simpler than the speeches that will be made there: who was responsible for keeping prejudiced jurors out, and what exactly failed?