Sparks: Outrage mounts in Malta after acquittal over journalist's murder

A bomb kills the questioner; the verdict kills the question; the crowd fills the square, and the square, like the cup, is useful for what it holds empty.

When the wealthy man's interest purchases the silence of the one who examined his accounts, this is not justice failing but a market in which justice itself is the commodity, and the buyer alone knows the price.

Hundreds gathered in the square to be outraged, and every speech began by honouring her memory, and no one said aloud that the men who profited from her reporting still hold their seats.

The battle was lost years before the verdict, on terrain where the accused chose the judges; he who controls the ground need never fire the shot.

A judiciary that can be reached by wealth is not a weak institution but a working one, working precisely as its unexamined design permits, and no appeal to virtue will mend what architecture allows.

If a man may be found innocent of ordering what everyone knows was ordered, then the question is no longer who killed her, but what remains of a law that answers only to those it should bind.

She asked her questions and they silenced her with fire, and now the tribunal declares no one lit it - the institution's innocence is itself the confession.

As water finds the crack no mason sees, money finds the flaw in every court; study the channel, not the flood, and you will find where the wall was left thin on purpose.

How fortunate that the court found no mastermind, for the bomb, one supposes, assembled itself, chose its victim, and detonated from a sincere love of order.

The crowd stood in the square and shouted, then went home to their dinners; the room is sealed, and the shouting is the ventilation the prisoners allow themselves.

She was called reckless, called a troublemaker, educated by her enemies into a caution they then cited as proof she asked for what came - the circularity is complete, and it killed her.

Everyone in the courtroom treated the verdict as the law speaking; the crisis is precisely that the law's common sense has been written by the men it was meant to judge.

Things that are hateful: a verdict delivered in summer, a square full of candles, a rich man walking home past the crowd that knows, and a question that died with the only person brave enough to ask it.