The 'Night Meeting' Charge - Selective Enforcement and Contradictory Claims by the Prosecution
- In the matter of indictment fourteen (the "Night Meeting Affair"), another argument was raised by Adv. Perry for the defense of justice, due to selective enforcement against Fischer, while the other participants in the meeting (except Ruth David) were not prosecuted; And especially Malka, who was initially prosecuted for this incident as well, but was eventually dropped from the fourteenth charge.
Ostensibly, less attention could have been devoted to this issue, given the accuser's recognition in the framework of the arguments for punishment that Fischer did not take a dominant part in the meeting, which is also reflected in the accuser's agreement to see the night meeting as part of the first event of the offense of disruption in the Biton affair, even though the two affairs took place more than a year apart.
And it is not. The restrictive view (as it should have been) on the part of the accuser of the nightly meeting affair is only a feature of recent years. On the other hand, in the first years of the conduct of the proceeding, this affair took a real place in the accuser's claims. Precisely because of the importance attributed to this indictment at the outset, the concession that the Department for the Investigation of Police granted to Malka by agreeing to expel him from the indictment in an improper manner, further undermined Fischer's sense of justice and fairness, and gave him additional grounds to demand a reduced sentence. This is already due to the damage that the "night meeting" charge caused him over the years when he hovered like a sword over his head.
On the same day that the Department for the Investigation of Police submitted to the court the amended indictment against Malka, in which his name was removed from the charge of the "night meeting" (June 10, 2015), Malka's attorney used this development in a hearing before the detention judge, where he claimed that Malka's fear of disruption of the proceedings decreased since, unlike Fischer, he was no longer charged with the offense of disruption in connection with the night meeting (p. 15 of the transcript of June 10, 2015 in the file Detention until the end of the proceedings 28760-05-15). Malka's counsel reiterated this in a hearing held on July 13, 2015, in his request for a reconsideration of Malka's detention until the end of the proceedings (p. 28). Even earlier, Fischer's accusation in the nightly meeting affair was expressed in the Supreme Court's decision of July 9, 2015, in which the concern of obstruction of justice was discussed as grounds for his detention until the end of the proceedings (Miscellaneous Criminal Applications 4658/15). Judge Amit noted that unlike the other charges, which do not attribute to Fischer the disruption of his own interrogation, the twelfth indictment in the matter of the nightly meeting anchors such a concern; He further added that he did not see any real weight to be given to Fischer's counsel's claim that his part in the meeting was only passive (ibid., paragraph 10).