Pardoned mother was so controlling, she sat near son while he studied, court hears

The mother who was recently pardoned after she was jailed for three months for denying her ex-husband access to their son, controlled the son to the extent that she sat near him while he was studying, the husband’s lawyer claimed this morning. The lawyer, Robert Abela, was making his submissions in court to an appeal by the 57-year-old teacher who, in a separate case, was sentenced to serve a one-month prison term after she was found guilty of breaching another court ruling related to access to her son. The woman has asked the President for a second pardon. Her lawyer, Ludwig Caruana, said that that the son was 16 at the time and his mother could not control him. Had she really wanted to stop him from seeing his father, she would have done so when he was younger. But Dr Abela claimed that the case had become a trial by media. The mother, he said, conveniently blamed the child, who had not even been brought in as witness to substantiate the mother’s claims. Dr Abela said that it was not true that problems began in 2011 but much earlier. The father had never gone to the police before because he wanted to avoid problems for his son. But when matters became extreme, he was left with...