This is not the first jury to take longer than a month.

Malta had already seen jury trials run past a month before the Fenech case. At least three can be documented, and one of them ended barely a year before Fenech's jury was sworn in.

At least three earlier juries passed the one-month mark

Lawrence Pullicino, 1993. The trial of the former Police Commissioner over the death of Nardu Debono ran from 11 January to 10 March 1993: 51 trial days, or 59 calendar days. The jury then deliberated for 76 hours. Until this year it held the record for the longest Maltese trial involving murder or complicity in murder.

The Maksar trial, 2025. The trial of the Maksar gang, over the murders of Daphne Caruana Galizia and Carmel Chircop, opened on 24 April 2025. On 4 June, MaltaToday reported proceedings on their 36th day, with the jury due to deliberate the next day. It involved four accused and 157 witnesses and is described in later reporting as a six-week trial.

BICAL, 1977. The trial of Cecil and Henry Pace in the BICAL case began on 20 April 1977 and ended on 28 October, around six months later. Times of Malta, relying on crime historian Eddie Attard, calls it the longest trial in Maltese history. It is a weaker comparison: the trial was interrupted by juror travel and illness, and jurors were eventually allowed to sleep at home rather than stay sequestered.

When the Fenech trial reached 48 days, The Malta Independent described it as tied with Maksar as the second-longest Maltese criminal trial involving a killing, behind only Pullicino. It went on to reach 55 trial days, between 1 July and 2 September 2026, and set the murder-trial record.

Under 20 days20 to 2930 to 4950 or more

How long a jury normally lasts

Malta publishes no official average. The nearest figure comes from court-administration sources quoted by Times of Malta in 2016, who said most jury trials had traditionally lasted around 10 to 14 days. The same report noted that the three most recent trials at the time had run 15, 19 and 16 days, and that homicide trials tend to last longer than drug-trafficking cases.

The documented cases fit that picture. Below the top four, the next-longest trial found is Meinrad Calleja's in 2004, at 21 trial days. Every other documented trial falls between 12 and 19 days. Month-long juries sit well outside the usual range.

They are also a small share of a small total. According to the Ministry for Justice, as cited in the European Commission's 2026 rule-of-law report, Malta held an average of eight jury trials a year, rising to a record 18 in 2025.

Evaluation

What was said holds. Fenech's was not the first Maltese jury to take longer than a month: Pullicino's ran 51 trial days in 1993, Maksar's at least 36 in 2025, and BICAL's around six months in 1977. The speaker's reference to a former commissioner matches the Pullicino trial exactly.

The detail is less exact. The other past case he pointed to, a major trial in the 2000s involving a presidential pardon, matches Meinrad Calleja's trial, which ran 21 trial days, about four weeks, and did not pass a month. The claim also leaves out how rare such trials are: the documented examples are few, set against a typical length of around two weeks. Fenech's jury was not unprecedented, but at 55 trial days it is still the longest murder trial Malta has recorded.