FREEDOM HOPE AFTER DECADE IN A MALTESE PRISON
ADAD jailed for more than a decade in Malta for having five cannabis plants could be freed within months. Speaking from his prison cell, Daniel Holmes, from Newport, revealed he could be released on parole.
“Hopefully I’ll get out in August,” he said.
“It’s going to be hard getting back to outside life after 12 or 13 years of fighting this idiocy over a few plants.
“It has taken such a chunk of my life – all my married life – for cannabis. “It just strikes me as ridiculous.” Daniel, who has two daughters, was convicted on Gozo in 2011, and was handed a decade-long sentence at Corradino Correctional Facility near the Maltese capital, Valletta.
He was originally arrested in 2006 and held for 11 days before being bailed.
Later he was held on remand for almost a year on suspicion of car theft. He was found not guilty of that.
The authorities refused to give him back the time he served in that case.
After the drug trial a Constitutional Court hearing found his “right to a fair trial had been breached”.
But his sentence remained the same and he was awarded just £5,500 compensation.
Daniel’s flatmate, Barry Lee, was arrested alongside him.
He was found hanged in 2010 while awaiting sentencing.
“They killed my mate,” Daniel said. “He died in a part of the prison which should not have even been open.”
Daniel’s post-release future remains up in the air.
“I don’t know if they are going to deport me – I’m trying to get my passport back,” the dad of two said.
Daniel and wife Marzena married inside the 175-year-old prison in May 2012. Finances forced Marzena to return to Cardiff that December and she moved in with her mother in St Mellons.
Daniel said: “I want to go back to the UK because my family is there.”
In 2016 he met his daughter Blossom for the first time.
She was conceived while her dad was in prison.
“When we get back together as a family I should think we’ll spend a long time catching up,” Daniel said.
“I have been away from my wife for so long. We might try and add to the tribe as well.
“It will be great to take the pressure off the missus. “It has been doubly hard for her. “She has had to deal with all the real stuff – the financial, the emotional and the social stuff.”
On his release Daniel plans to fight for the legalisation of cannabis.
“Everyone has a different pleasure of some kind,” the 39-year-old said.
“Life is not easy for anyone. Unless it directly involves someone else in a heinous way who is to say it’s wrong?
“I would like to try and fight to get it bloody legal everywhere.
“I want to live in a world where that part of my life is not a crime so I can get on with the rest of my life.
“If it’s legal everywhere then everyone can have a couple of plants.”
Malta’s laws make no distinction between cultivating and trafficking and the authorities threw the book at Daniel.
Islanders have widely backed him citing cases where more serious offenders received lesser sentences.
In 2013 Daniel petitioned the European Commission alleging “systemic discrimination” against non-Maltese. “Five plants is not really a drugs factory,” he said.
“I remember going to see Howard Marks when I was about 13 or 14 doing his Mr Nice stuff. I thought: ‘What a guy’.
“I would like to think we have both done our little bit.”
His family have already spent tens of thousands of pounds in their fight for justice.
Daniel’s dad, Mel Holmes, said he was “quite hopeful” his son would be home next year.
“He is looking forward to being back in his homeland,” Mel, who lives in Worthing, Sussex, said.
“I’m not sure what he will to do for a living – he would like to make a living writing.”
He added: “There is a movement in Malta to have a celebration to welcome him back to the community.
“He is quite gregarious but he does not want to be in the public eye in case the authorities find something else to grab him for.”
Malta’s Department of Information was contacted but had not replied at the time of writing.