The trial of those charged in relation to the deadly Mati fire of 2018 has come to an end. But it has failed to satisfy the public. To the extent that a trial relating to a dreadful tragedy has descended into a trial of a trial.
It seems the Association of Judges and Prosecutors was right to have announced (on April 30) that “in a state governed by the Rule of Law, justice is not awarded in line with populism or rabble-rousing.”
And of course no sensible person wants to see a return to the law of the lynch mob, or takes pleasure in the spectacle of blame being placed on judges in a reckless and unprincipled way.
The judiciary is obviously not to blame if a lenient law passed in 2019 allowed the defendants a “soft landing”, no matter if it has since been repealed.
No, it is SYRIZA’s parliamentary majority that was responsible for passing the legislation on the eve of the elections and under dubious circumstances.
Not that this makes it any easier for the man on the street to accept that defendants found culpable for 102 deaths and sentenced to a total of 111 years in prison should have ended up with a simple fine.
Still harder to swallow is that it took six years for this trial to run its course, bringing us perilously close to the statute of limitation for these offenses.
Because neither rabble-rousing nor populism is at fault for this incredible delay and its possible consequences. No, it is the very people charged with seeing that justice is done who bear the blame.
During this period, the investigator in charge asked on no fewer than three (!) occasions for the indictment to be upgraded, to avoid precisely the backlash we are seeing today from an indignant public.
And on each occasion, it wasn’t the rabble-rousers or the populists who rejected the request, it was the Indictment Division.
A suspicious mind might discern some political plan to ensure the people responsible for the tragedy would get off lightly, with maneuverings that began under SYRIZA and achieved their desired result last Monday.
But far for me to entertain such thoughts. We trust and respect the judiciary always, not just when we like its decisions.
We are not even asking the justice system to respond to the “public desire to see justice done” or to satisfy the relatives and friends of the victims. No, that is not Justice’s concern.
But we do ask the justice system to honor our trust. So that we never again have to explain the unexplainable and make sense of the nonsensical.
