Posts Tagged ‘Italian legal system’

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150 years of not quite growing up

January 20, 2011

This year, 2011, is the 150th anniversary of the unification of Italy. Expect a lot of excuses. The most obvious and already well-used is: ‘We are a young country.’ Up north, where the Germans are presently pondering whether to bail Italy and more junior members of the Olive Belt back into the Euro, voters might be forgiven for wondering: ‘But wasn’t our unification 10 years after Italy’s?’ Truth be told, Italy today is one of the hardest countries in the world to defend: rich, established, and perennially juvenile. It is like your school friend who never grew up. When we were 15, the guy seemed like an interesting maverick. Today he’s just a bit of a tit, and one who still lives with his mother.

It may also be that 2011, this great anniversary, heaps an unprecedented level of bad publicity on Italy. There is likely to be a general election — which Berlusconi will win. What can you say? ‘Aging, plastic-surgery deformed teen-worrier romps home as housewives make lunch with increaingly limited resources.’? Meanwhile, it is ever more likely that the murder case in Perugia, about which I have blogged repeatedly (look under the Italy to Avoid tab), will fall apart in a manner that exposes Italy’s nastiest demons. No one comes up smiling from this one. The police, the magistrates, the press: all, I suspect, are set to be exposed for a congenital lack of professionalism. I am as happy as the next man if mamma makes good pasta, but if your pasta enjoyment bites into your professional life such that you are willing to see two innocent kids go down for 25 years, then the retrogusto is just not good.

The first appeal of Knox and Sollecito has started on a different footing to the original trial. After the cringe-making final statement to the court made by Knox first time around, in which she thanked ‘the system’ for its hard work (I gave my verdict here), she was sent out by a new legal team to deliver a dose of reality just before Christmas. The Guardian reported that the [what pass in this system for] jurors were ‘riveted’ when reminded by Knox in a 14-minute set-piece speech that their country is not among the G8’s leaders in institutional standards and efficiency. The new tone, for me, is the right one: show a hopeful respect to the court, but at the same time remind it that the world is watching. This is an uncomfortable position to be in for anyone who believes in the rule of law, but in an institutionally deficient country I have yet to see a better approach. Certainly it is an approach that everyone I know in China who deals with the monstrous Chinese justice system agrees on. In Perugia, Knox and Sollecito have been granted a review of DNA evidence by the appeal judge.

Apart from being white, reasonably attractive and middle-class, Knox and Sollecito are also beginning to enjoy other kinds of luck. Early reports in the past couple of weeks said that a key witness who placed them, rather weakly, at the scene of the crime on the day of the murder, had been arrested for drug dealing. I figured a bit of marijuana and wondered how this could really undermine the (albeit marginal) testimony. Now a report in the UK tabloid Daily Mirror claims heroin dealing and that Curatolo has ‘testified’ in two other murder cases. One awaits more concrete information than you find in a Red Top, but the discrediting of this witiness, given the weakness of the other evidence, would have the potential to carry the case quickly into the arena of farce. At least for those who don’t think it is there already.

The great revelation for me in recent weeks has been the oped in The Independent written by a British doctor who now lives in Umbria and who was formerly caught up in a great miscarriage of justice in England. David C. Anderson likens that 35-year-old story to what is going on in Italy today. I remember the case myself, not least because it occurred close to where I was born. Anderson recalls how police sent down Stefan Ivan Kiszko for the murder of an 11-year-old child. A future Conservative Home Secretary of the 1980s (and capital punishment supporter), David Waddington was the defending barrister. A future Lord Chief Justice was the prosecuting barrister. The police and the justice system, seeking a swift reckoning for a brutal killing, decided Kiszko was the guilty party and fabricated evidence to make sure he was condemned. They were grotesquely unprofessional. Kiszko spent 16 years in prison and then died 6 months after the miscarriage of justice was acknowledged. He was one of the reasons behind the 1985 Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE) which meant the police finally had to do things like tape record interviews.

That was the 1970s and Kiszko was a fat unmarried man in possession of a few pornographic magazines who had been falsely accused by teenage girls of exposing himself. In cases which I dealt with as a young journalist in 1990, the falsely convicted ‘IRA bombers’ known as the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six had been working class Irish men with Nationalist sympathies when they were jailed in the 1970s. But here, in Italy, today, in 2011, 26 years after the PACE was passed into law in the UK, they are still locking up middle-class white kids for murder on the basis that they were acting a bit weird and so might be part of a ritual Satanistic plot. It’s like a cross between The Crucible and Mediaset. No, it is a cross between The Crucible and Mediaset.

Anderson’s oped in The Independent also contains a hypothetical suggestion that seems to me explosive. Since the beginning of this case I have had no doubt about the professional incompetence of the police, the forensics team and the magistrates (though I would stress that I do not regard this as universal, merely common, in Italy). But I have always been troubled as to why Knox named the black bar owner Patrick Lumumba in her illegally extracted testimony during an all-night interrogation by 12 police officers without a lawyer. I can see the police brutality, the girl’s fear, and so on. But what I could not see is how a black bar owner would be offered up as the murderer by some liberal, west coast American girl with a vibrator. Anderson offers a potential explanation: he says that the police, conducting their illegal interview of Knox five days after the murder, must have already known that a black man was involved. It seems to me this would mean they had some early lead from the forensic investigation (Ivorian-born Rudy Guede’s blood, semen, DNA and more were all over the crime scene). So the police would have heard from the ‘scientists‘ that there was a black man involved, at the same time as what they had in their hand was two young whities they believed were behaving strangely. By leaning on Knox in the middle of the night, they could connect up the dots via a story about a black bar owner who Amanda Knox knew well. Knox, Sollecito and Lumumba end up together in a motiveless ritual Satanic murder plot. Except that then the police realised that what they really had was hard forensic evidence on Rudy Guede. So the prosecuting team needed to switch to Knox, Sollecito and Guede in a motiveless ritual Satanic murder plot. Anything else would require the capacity to say you were wrong. This is of course a hypothesis. But unlike Mr Mignini’s, it is plausible.

Separately, after much to-ing and fro-ing with lawyers and libel specialists, I will soon be able to bring you the full and bizarre story of my own legal entanglements in Italy. Although the accusations are frivolous by Perugia standards, you will note a striking pattern of behaviour by police and magistrates. This, for me, is the most important good thing that can come out of the Knox-Sollecito miscarriage of justice: that people accept that there is a systemic pattern of failure in Italian justice. It is not about the people, it is about the structure they are using.

Meanwhile, look at these:

The chief investigator boasts on television that physical evidence was unnecessary in the Perugia investigation because the Italian police’s psychological interrogation techniques are so advanced. You really could not make this stuff up. Please send it viral. There are 5,000 hits so far.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWkZPWRS3N0

This site I had not seen before. It looks, at first blush, to be carefully and sensibly done, though it places, for me, too much emphasis on Mignini and too little on the systemic failings of the Italian justice apparatus.

http://www.injusticeinperugia.org/

They have translated a small amount of the above site into Italian, though I have not yet had time to look:

http://www.amandaknox.it/

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Book Review: The Dark Heart of Italy

January 29, 2010

Much of my life (because it is part of my work) is spent reading books, but so far on this blog I have not attempted a book review. Somehow it seems apt to begin with a book about Italy, and one which has aroused extreme passions.

The Dark Heart of Italy is not an original book. It fits into a post-Second World War tradition of informed foreigners deconstructing Italy at a national, political level (think of Banfield, Ginsborg, Stille, Lane). Sometimes this goes from the local and particular to the general (Banfield); more often, it is top down.

So The Dark Heart of Italy is not so much a book in its own right as another iteration of a genre. Myself, I find this genre to be a serious one characterised by serious authors. None of those mentioned thus far is a flippant or publicity-seeking writer. (Think of the opposite tradition, typified by Frances Mayes’ romantic fantasy, Under the Tuscan Sun). The Italy deconstruction is a serious business. This applies equally to the Italians who have practised the craft: Levi, Sciascia, Pirandello, Lampedusa… Indeed, it is striking how seriously non-fiction authors treat Italy, a country that could easily be handled in critical books in the way it is in the UK and American tabloid press.

At least as interesting as the content of The Dark Heart of Italy is an attempt to understand why it elicits extreme responses. A quick read of 46 reviews on Amazon’s UK site shows the book to have 20 five-star and nine one-star verdicts. In other words, the great majority of reviewers say this is either a very good book or a very bad book.

First, however, to the content. The Dark Heart of Italy flits in an out of personal experiences of the author while he was living four years in Parma. But its narrative drive comes from a potted history of post-Second World War communist and fascist terrorism and Italy’s failed attempts to attribute responsibility for this, most particularly through the legal system.

Intellectually, Jones’ approach follows your archetypcal northern European, post-Englightenment logic: if I do enough work, and think very carefully, I will arrive at plausible, rational explanations. Needless to say, this does not happen, and much of the book details the endless paper trail that the author follows to nowhere.

Along the way, there are astute observations. On the nature of the legal system: ‘What is important is not the principle, but the points of law. Codify, recodify, encrypt. Quod not est in actis non est in mundo: anything not written down, documented, simply doesn’t exist.’ On the failure to reach decisions: ‘No one is ever entirely guilty, no one is ever simply innocent. It’s part of the rewiring process of living in Italy that you can never say, even about the most crooked criminal, that they are factually, legally guilty: there’s always the qualifier that they’re “both innocent and guilty”. Sooner or later the accusation will be dropped anyway, because the deadline for a judicial decision has been superseded.’ On the politicisation of the judiciary: ‘If you point out that the Italian parliament (of 650 senators or deputies) currently has fifty politicians inquisiti (under investigation), people simply shrug: “the magistrates must be out to get them, that’s all.”’ On the reality of a political class that changes affiliations but not personnel: ‘in 1960… of the 64 first-class provincial prefects, all but two had served under Fascism, as had all 241 deputy prefects, and 135 questori (provincial chiefs of the state police). As late as 1973, 95% of all civil servants had been appointed to the service before the fall of Mussolini.’ On the concurrent presence of political extremism: ‘”There must be a reason,” an Italian academic wrote recently, “why it was Italy which was the fatherland of Fascism and of the largest Communist party in the western world.”’ On conspiracy theories: ‘Surrounding any crime or political event, there is always confusion, suspicion and “the bacillus of secrecy”. So much so that dietrologia has become a sort of national pastime. It means literally “behindology”, or the attempt to trump even the most fanciful and contorted conspiracy theory.’ (The recent Sollecito-Knox case in Perugia, about which I blogged in February 2009 and in December 2009, bears some of these hallmarks.)

On the contrast between the beauty you see around you and the cultural condition of contemporary Italy, Jones quotes a friend: ‘What you don’t realise, what none of you British realise, is that Italy is a cultural desert. You come here to gawp at buildings and chipped statues from 500 years ago, and imagine that we’re still in that level of cultural production. Which is, of course, absolute balls: Italy’s now, culturally, completely arid. If I were you I would go back to the 50s and 60s. Switch off the television and watch some old films instead…’

And there is a good description of the celebrated Sofri case, which led to a highly questionable 22-year term for a stubborn and principled political activist for, as one journalist put it, ‘not having doffed his cap to the bureaucratic cast of the judiciary’. There is a long interview with Sofri in which the jailed man observes of the judicial system: ‘Dietrologia is the air that you breathe in Italy. It’s the result of paranoia and jealousy, and it simply exalts an intricate intelligence. It’s like Othello and Desdemona’s handkerchief: one innocent object can spark off endless suspicions. It’s a game off endless suspicions. It’s a game which people play, almost to show off. I prefer not to see a conspiracy which exists than to see one where it doesn’t.’

Finally, there is a useful outline of the origins, the playing out and the undermining of the Mani Pulite anti-corruption movement in the early 1990s. Craxi is pelted with coins outside the hotel Raphael in Rome and soon flees into exile, the public sprays town walls with exultant graffiti about the defeat of dark forces, and Silvio Berlusconi creates a new political party named after a football chant, inviting top anti-corruption judge Antonio di Pietro to be his Minister for Justice. ‘His [di Pietro’s] moralising anxiety,’ declared Berlusconi, ‘belongs to everyone.’ Today that remark seems even funnier than it did 16 years ago. Di Pietro turned him down, but Berlusconi convinced at least one other Clean Hands magistrate to join Forza Italia.

The problem with the book, I think, is that it does not clearly separate institutions from people. The realisation that Jones comes to is of the low institutional quality of Italy. But because this is bound up with the individual stories of politicians, journalists, lawyers and others, the tale becomes an unduly general one of a failed society. There is a tendency to see failed institutions as the product of a failed people. On the contrary, I think it is more accurate to see failed individuals – terrorists, corrupt politicians, egomaniacal magistrates – as symptoms of institutional weakness rather than proof of societal failure. This leaves open the possibility – to me a certainty – that in Italy’s atomised, localised and family-centric sociology there are not only people who are unsullied by institutional weakness, there are also those who react against it by becoming ‘super-moral’ contributors to society. The biggest challenge of a deconstruction of Italy, which is always drawn to critique its institutions, is not to explain why there are so many crooks, but rather why there are not more.

In addition, one has to give a nod – which Jones does not – to odd areas of institutional strength. On many trains, and in many schools and hospitals in Italy – to give a few examples – my experience is that the attitude and morale of the ‘public servants’ one encounters is often better that what I see in the UK (though I have less recent experience there). The school system has an institutional integrity that comes from not being ghettoised between state and private provision like the UK one, even if more and more people are lamenting the condition of secondary education. There are clear benefits to the less centralised institutional structure of the country, something that all major political parties in the (super-centralised) UK have been talking up in recent years. And town centres in Italy are maintained with a loving care and pride that is much rarer in the UK. These points, and others, don’t wipe out the sins of Italy’s vampiric state-linked professional classes, but the points are nonetheless valid.

And so to those wildly divergent Amazon reviews. It is notable that among those who give The Dark Heart of Italy five stars and particularly rousing praise are Italians who have moved to the UK. Among the one-star reviews, meanwhile, are slightly hysterical Italians living in Italy and English women married to Italian men.

 

The book deserves ratings in the middle, and this is where the more thoughtful comments are found. One that is hard to disagree with is the observation that Jones could, of course, ‘write a book called the Dark Heart of Great Britain. Where we all live in this hellish society trapped in houses by rain, where everybody is overworked, bank holidays and Sundays are spent in the shopping centre and our only escape is through the good people on the TV who will find us a new life somewhere in Tuscany, Spain or France.’ Myself, I am giving the book four stars, which is above the current average of 3.6. (It is notable on Amazon that it is very hard to get a high score for a non-fiction book on Italy.)

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Chinese soft power

January 5, 2010

The Chinese government decides to remind us that, whereas Italy is an institutionally weak state, China is the authentic institutional Third World, the real McCoy (or real Mackay if you prefer the likely Scottish origin of this term) of arbitrary, unprofessional and gratuitously nasty behaviour. I refer to the execution of a mentally-ill Briton, and an 11-year jail sentence for one of China’s best-known pro-democracy campaigners, which occurred in the same week.

 Akmal Shaikh, 53, a former London minicab manager, was executed in Urumqi for arriving in China with a suitcase containing 4kg of heroin. He had a long history of psychiatric problems. It appears that drug traffickers duped him into carrying the drugs and sent him to China saying it was part of a plan for him to fulfil his ambition of becoming a ‘pop star’. Arrested on arrival, Shaikh was given a 30 minute trial. During a statement he made during his also brief appeal, judges laughed at Shaikh’s nonsensical discourse and confirmed the death penalty, as this China law blog relates.

The 11-year jail sentence was handed down to writer Liu Xiaobo for ‘inciting subversion of state power’. Liu is one of the main drafters of Charter ’08, the Chinese pro-democracy manifesto published two years ago and modelled on Charter ’77, which was launched by dissidents in Czechoslovakia in the midst of the Cold War. Liu was also given a very brief trial at which his lawyers were allowed almost no time to present a defence (the obvious defence is that Liu has done nothing other than exercise rights guaranteed by China’s constitution). The court condemned him at Christmas, presumably in the hope that foreigners were thinking about other things.

If this was the hope, it may have been misplaced, since the cases of both Liu Xiaobo and Akmal Shaikh have received worldwide media coverage. Not for a long time has China faced so much negative press in such a short period.

The Chinese government and its running dogs have shot back with what philosophers call ‘moral equivalence’, or the argument that ‘you’re just the same as we are, only from a different culture’. This might involve reference to the fact that the death penalty is used in the United States, or that all countries have to defend against attacks on state power. 

But these attempts at obfuscation  do not cloud what is stark reality. In the Shaikh case, the court refused to allow either an independent local doctor or a psychiatrist sent from Britain to meet or assess the defendant. China’s 1997 Criminal Code states that a person who is unable to recognize or control his own misconduct does not bear criminal responsibility. However there is no clear requirement for a court to order a psychiatric evaluation. The main justice-related role of psychiatric institutions in China continues to be as places in which to lock up sane people who have criticised the state.  

The Liu case is a reminder that China’s courts are subject to direction by the Communist Party’s  Central Political-Legal Committee, currently headed by former Minister of Public Security Zhou Yongkang, which determines the outcome of many ‘special’ cases and makes sure that others – such as challenges to the Party – are never admitted to trial. Liu’s 11-year sentence was not really a judicial decision at all. 

A selction of British press comment on the execution of Akmal Shaikh:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/blog/2009/dec/29/china-akmal-shaikh-execution

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/29/amnesty-akmal-shaikh-execution-reaction

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/dec/29/china-akmal-shaikh-death-penalty

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/6904175/Execution-of-Briton-Akmal-Shaikh-China-defiant-in-the-face-of-criticism.html

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/china-defiant-after-britons-execution-1852307.html

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article6970154.ece

More information about Liu Xiaobo:

http://www.pen.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/3029/prmID/172

http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2009/12/21/china-liu-xiaobo-s-trial-travesty-justice

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liu_Xiaobo

Deja vu all over again: the letter which Vaclev Havel and others connected with Charter ’77 tried to deliver to the Chinese embassy in Prague (as reprinted in the Washington Post) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/08/AR2010010803376.html?hpid%3Dopinionsbox1&sub=AR

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Professor Plum and Miss Scarlett, in the bedroom, with big daggers and no motive …

December 8, 2009

The conviction of Raffaele Sollecito and Amanda Knox for, amongst other things, murder, in Perugia highlights a simple, cultural question: how do you like your theories – straight-up conspiracy, or otherwise? Because, it seems to me, you need to be a conspiracy junky to go for this one.

Despite a trial of 11 months, the basic issues of this case do not appear to be hugely complicated. First up, remember that the trial took 11 months largely because it only sat for, at most, two half days a week, and that the whole thing was stopped for two months because it was, err, the summer. If the court had concentrated full-time, Monday to Friday, on this case, and not skipped off to the seaside or wherever, a rough calculation suggests it would have been done in around 10 weeks. One point of view I completely disagree with is this, quoted from one Michele Ainis, who is cited as an expert in Italian constitutional law in The New York Times: ‘It’s true that the longer the trial,’ he says, ‘the longer the pain, but it also means that there can be an in-depth analysis of the facts.’ This conflates the kind of time wasting and dicking around that goes on in the Italian court system with a higher form of investigation. The truth, surely, is that this case reminds us of just how dangerous the Italian ‘part-time’ approach to legal cases may be.

So to the basic issues. There is a crime scene, the location of which – to my knowledge – no one disputes. It is the room of the murdered student Meredith Kercher, where her dead body was found. One person is tied to the crime scene by heavy forensic evidence – finger-prints, a bloody hand-print, and DNA. This is Rudy Guede, already sentenced to 30 years for Kercher’s murder in an earlier trial. There was no conspiracy theory about Guede. He was found because his prints and DNA were at the scene, and the police located him in their database (he already had a police record). When they went looking for Guede a couple of weeks after the murder, they discovered that he had fled from Italy to Germany.

Sollecito and Knox were not brought into the case because police found clear forensic evidence and then went looking for them. They were brought into the case because police and the investigating magistrate became suspicious of them, and then went looking for evidence. Perhaps critically, the authorities decided that Sollecito and Knox were involved before it was clear that prints and DNA at the scene belonged to Guede. Subsequently, the prosecution case became that all three persons were responsible for the murder.

So what evidence is there that Sollecito and Knox were present at the crime scene? There was no forensic evidence presented in the case to show that Knox had been in the room – no prints, no DNA, nothing. With respect to Sollecito, the prosecution said that traces of his DNA were found on a bra clasp belonging to Kercher which police bagged on a return visit to the crime scene 46 days after the murder. There was no other Sollecito DNA found in the room, including on the rest of the bra, and no prints. Despite this lack of forensic evidence, the prosecution made a case that Kercher was killed at the end of a violent sex game involving Guede, Sollecito and Knox. Perhaps you see now what I mean about one’s propensity for conspiracy theories. In order for this to be possible, Sollecito and Knox must have been present at the crime scene in such as way as to leave Guede’s forensic detritus all over the place and yet remove all of their own prints and DNA except for a bit of Sollecito’s on a bra clasp. How? The two explanations I can think of are a) that Sollecito and Knox took part in a sex game dressed in some kind of protective forensive overalls while Guede didn’t, or b) that afterwards Sollecito and Knox selectively cleaned up only evidence of themselves, leaving Guede’s intact, using some kind of finger print and DNA differentiator machine they happened to have about their persons.

This is not terribly compelling. Apart from the bra clasp (whose belated discovery points most obviously to shocking standards of police work), only two other bits of forensic evidence were presented against Sollecito and Knox. In a communal bathroom, where some drops of Kercher’s blood were found, there was Knox’s DNA. Given that Knox says she took a shower in the room the morning after the murder and noticed the blood, this hardly seems damning. Finally there is a tiny trace of what prosecutors claim is Kercher’s DNA on a knife at Sollecito’s apartment. This would be of real interest, except that the trace is so minute that independent experts say that it cannot be relied on (and indeed would not be admitted in many jurisdictions). Moreover, this knife is a possible fit for only one of three major wounds on Kercher’s body.

Given the paucity of forensic evidence against Sollecito and Knox, as opposed to the very substantial amount against Guede, most people, I suspect, would want to hear a compelling case for the motivation of the first two. After the chief prosecutor’s intimations of a cult killing (oh yes), about which I blogged back in February 2009, were knocked back, the prosecution had nothing more substantive to offer. The prosecutiing team switched, without any hard evidence, to an argument that Knox, orchestrating the murder, was driven by hatred of Kercher. As this line was pursued, the presiding judge, Giancarlo Massei, allowed both hearsay and subjective assessment to be offered in court. Chief prosecutor Mignini, for instance, told the court (referencing some missing money): ‘We do not know with certainty what intentions they [Guede, Sollecito, Knox, at the onset of their alleged murderous sex game] may have had. But it is possible that there was an argument, which then degenerated, between Mez [Meredith] and Amanda over the money that disappeared. Or perhaps the British student was upset by Guede’s presence.’

It is possible that horoscopes are based in scientific fact, that farting in Denmark can cause earthquakes in Japan, and that my dog can sing in Welsh. Nonetheless, such claims are not normally admissible in court without a demonstrable basis in fact. Here, for the record, are Mignini’s above remarks in the original Italian: ‘Non sappiamo con certezza [I suspect a logician or a philosopher might translate this as: ‘We have no clue’] che intenzioni avessero, ma è possibile che ci sia stata una discussione, poi degenerata, tra Mez e Amanda per i soldi scomparsi. O forse la studentessa inglese era contrariata per la presenza di Guede.’ Whatever the intention, said Mignini, group leader Knox, ‘voleva vendicarsi di quella smorfiosa troppo seria e morigerata per i suoi gusti’. So Knox led Sollecito, whom she had known for six days, and Guede, whom she barely knew, in a violent sex game which left no trace of her presence at the crime scene and ended in Kercher’s murder.

The question one asks next is how could a jury convict based on the evidence presented? We do not know and we should not speculate. Within 90 days the presiding judge will publish some kind of explanation. For now, however, it may be worth reflecting on what I understand to have been the methodology behind the jury’s decision.

In a British court, a judge provides direction to jurors (about things that must be considered, things which may not be considered), before they retire to consider their verdict. Moreover, jurors are ‘sequestered’, which means that they should not have been reading newspapers, watching television news, discussing the case with members of the public, and so on; they are supposed to concentrate exclusively on the case, which runs each working day until it ends.

A British judge’s direction to jurors is important and is frequently shown to have played a role in miscarriages of justice. The direction, however, is given in front of the court and the public. In a case such as that of Sollecito and Knox in Italy – as I understand it – it is two ‘professional’ jurors (i.e. members of the legal establishment) who sum up the evidence, and provide guidance as to what is most important, to six lay jurors in camera. Personally, I am at a loss as to what jurisprudential benefit this can offer. It means there is no clear public record of the direction that is provided. And it means that the lay jurors never escape from the paternal oversight of the court apparatus. This seems to me another example of the deference to the supposed expert with which Italy is plagued — rule by what in previous blogs I have termed a ‘bureaucratic aristocracy’. Myself, I would be much happier placing more trust in ordinary people. That is not the Italian way, despite – in my view – the daily evidence that it is this country’s professional classes that represent not its greatest asset but its biggest problem.

This brings us to the family of the murdered girl. After the verdicts, Kercher family members gave a press conference and made two points. The first is that in a situation like this you have to trust ‘the system’; the second is that they now have a decision and hence some kind of closure. Although I sympathise profoundly, I disagree with both these points. On the first, I know of no legal system in the world that has not produced miscarriages of justice; in the UK I followed some of these, professionally, in the distant past as a journalist. Given (for a rich country) the extreme institutional weakness of Italy, there is no case for blindly trusting the system here. The system can work in Italy, but it is reasonable to be more sceptical that it will than in most other OECD countries. On the second point, I suspect that within days of the verdicts (if not already) the Kerchers will realise these verdicts bring no closure, because the Italian justice system does not really do closure. Appeals are granted almost automatically. Moreover, as defence lawyers have been quick to note, the verdicts in this case of themselves demand appeals. With the conspiracy theory accepted, Guede is not alleged to have delivered the fatal blows, and yet has gone down for 30 years. Sollecito and Knox (the latter deemed to have delivered the mortal blow) have been given sentences of 25 and 26 years respectively. These are not the life (ergastolo) terms that the alleged crime would warrant. The sentences are inconsistent, almost made to be appealed. Indeed they look to some observers like ‘get me out of here and make this somebody else’s problem’ sentences on the part of the jury. And that is exactly what will happen in a process as likely to prolong as to curtail the suffering of Meredith Kercher’s family and friends.

On this question, here is something that I read in the Corriere della Sera: ‘Per la giuria popolare [i.e. the lay jurors] non è stata una decisione facile: condannare due ragazzi di 25 e 22 anni all’ergastolo sarebbe stato distruggere per sempre la loro vita; assolverli avrebbe significato sconfessare non solo l’intera inchiesta ma anche i giudici che prima di loro si sono espressi. Ed è arrivata una condanna a metà.’ Well, you said it, not me. If you don’t read Italian, what the newspaper appears to be suggesting is that Sollecito and Knox’s sentences were a compromise between embarrassing the court and the prosecution, and condemning the two to life in prison, which would be consistent with Guede’s term.

Separately, it is notable how upleasantly politicised this trial has become at the international level. This can only get worse. Knox is American, and various Americans are alleging anti-Americanism. I cannot see the evidence for this. Sollecito is Italian and he has gone down too. What is at issue here is the institutional weaknesses of Italian justice and the particular facts of the Perugia trial, not some assault on Uncle Sam. Moreover, Americans need to be a little careful about getting on their high horse over Italian justice. Theirs, after all, is the first country I am aware of to imprison fully one percent of its population, in an approach to law and order that most Europeans find despicable. This failure is not generally one of institutional shortcomings, but instead of a tolerance for levels of inequality and general ‘unfairness’ in society that are not present in Europe. Nonetheless, miscarriages of justice, as I said earlier, occur in all jurisdictions. The last case I paid any attention to before this one was OJ Simpson…

Those sceptical of the verdicts that have been handed down in Perugia need to remain closely focused. At the same time, I think Knox’s family is absolutely right to attract as much publicity as possible to the case. When confronted with institutional failure, as I have seen again and again in developing countries in Asia, it is essential to maintain the glare of public attention. This is the main way in which institutionally weak societies are compelled to confront their failings. The international noise needs to be loud, but not shrill.

Finally, finally, here is my reminder of the ways to create the kind of mess that this case represents: 1. lousy police work; the handling of the forensics in Perugia has been shoddy and yet the outcome of the case has rested largely on forensic evidence 2. A ‘professional’ class which sets its example by not following the rules. This is a society where policemen don’t wear seatbelts, park how they like, etc. In this case we have seen the judicial equivalent: despite rules which say that the findings of police investigations are secret until prosecutors ask for an indictment, in Perugia (as in almost all high-profile cases in Italy) there have been relentless leaks to the press from the outset. If the police and the magistracy leak information in contravention of basic rules of procedure, what reasonable expectation can there be for other people’s behaviour? Italian primary school teachers (thankfully) seem to understand that their job is about setting the right example, but not the rest of the Italian professional class. 

Links of interest:

A New York Times op-ed lets rip (but forgets about all those incarcerated Americans) before the verdicts are announced. 

From the Guardian’s generally excellent John Hooper, first a timeline for the murder and a guide to how weak forensic and circumstantial evidence might suggest that Sollecito and Knox were involved. 

Then Hooper’s review of questions raised about the Italian legal system and a discussion of questions of ‘face’ in Italy (something familiar to any student of China). Note that this story is filed after the one above and Hooper’s view, given more time for reflection, seems much more sceptical of the court’s decision. (I raise this point merely to remind readers of the pressures that serious journalists face, writing about complex issues to deadline.) 

Video

Final statements to court. Personally, I am not convinced these statements reflect the greatest legal advice. Sollecito reads a rather anodyne prepared statement, with just a few (presumably huge) words on each page, and looks stilted.  Knox attempts some kind of sucking up to the court, thanking jurors and prosecution for doing their job. If I had been subject to the kind of investigation, detention and character assassination witnessed in this trial, I would not have been thanking anyone.

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De-briefed

June 26, 2009

To the lawyer’s office for a post mortem on the case against James Stephens, Leonardo Petturiti and the building firm now calling itself Lacos. Laura, the lawyer, tots up the numbers. We first issued lawyers letters in the hope of getting our roof fixed without the need for a case in 2001, after non-lawyerly pleading had been ignored. A case was initiated in 2002 and accepted by the court in October 2002. It effectively ended in June 2009, with a settlement but no judicial decision, though there will be a final hearing to celebrate the archivazione of the case on 7 July.

It total, there will have been 15 hearings over eight years of pre-trial and trial activity. However three of these are from recent weeks under the dashing Dr. Cenci (who, having resolved almost all of Citta di Castello’s outstanding legal issues in less than a year of tenure, is to move on this summer). If one subtracts the Cenci hearings and the period before the first hearing, then the core case averaged one ‘audience’ every seven months for something over six years. A good rule for a hearing, I think, is two hours of standing around followed by something over an hour of achieving not much, followed by lunch.

With respect to our standing at the end of the case, the numbers give the following reckoning:

Incoming

Fat Boy pays us:                                Euro3,000

Petturiti pays us:                               Euro3,000

LAME/LACOS pays us:                       Euro3,000

Total                Euro9,000

Outgoing

Lawyer, court fees, etc                   Euro4,500

Initial survey by new geometra

to substantiate our case                  Euro1,000

Court-mandated roof survey by

geometra who won’t go on roof *   Euro2,300

Total                Euro7,800

*(The submission of this  survey took 18 months, or three times the stipulated norm.)

So the difference is Euro1,200. That covers some of the cost of the materials required to fix the roof (including a replacement terrace flooring). But the majority of the expense on external repairs was in the form of labour. After Petturiti and the building firm had come back for a joke, one-day intervention in 2001, when they threw down some sealant borrowed from another site, I was so concerned with being ripped off again (and I think at the time also broke) that I worked myself as the labourer/operaio for a retired builder from Pietralunga in order to sort out the roof; it was he who taught me something about building and with whom I have enjoyed working ever since. In some places we laid new roofing felt and in others we variously used sealant and added a new line of tiles to cover a water run-off where felt had not been laid properly. It was not at every leaking point a perfect solution, but we worked carefully, and the roof has not leaked since. Frankly, once a roof has been screwed up, it is a difficult thing to remedy completely, which is why in many places (including northern Italy) roofing is a specialist job. In all, including the refinishing of a terrace, it probably took the two of us two weeks each.

In addition to this, the single biggest expense would be (if we had done them) repairs to internal damage – including discoloured oak steps on the staircase, which were damaged by leaking water before they were sealed, and streaks, stains and mould on painted walls. The latter is the most problematic because in our house, as in successive apartments we have had in Citta di Castello, we used a time-consuming and expensive painting technique involving a base of white calce, layers of calce-based natural colour, and a finishing layer of wax mixed with natural oils. The aesthetic possibilities of this technique are considerable, and the wax finish makes the walls cleanable, but if you get water coming in behind the surface, the wax means it has nowhere to go, hence mould. Given the cost, and the reality of three small kids in the house, we have redecorated only the room that was worst affected.

So what were the lessons from the case? The first, I think, is that if you have a problem with building work, take lots and lots of photographs of physical evidence yourself. I foolishly left most of this to the geometras who came to survey the damage. When I was covering one part of the roof in plastic to stop water coming in, and particularly while we were repairing different parts of the roof, there were ample opportunities to take more photographs to show exactly how roofing felt had been mis-applied. With the benefit of hindsight, it seems very silly not to have done this. I think that once we began to fix the roof I was just so relieved that something was being done that I lost my focus on the case. (I am not certain that photos taken while we did the repairs, when the case was already running, would be admissible; but they should still have been taken.) I also thought that another builder, who was then running his own firm, and who came up and saw (indeed explained) much of what had been done wrong, would provide clear testimony in the case.

That was lesson number two. Never expect a builder to provide testimony against another builder, never expect a geometra to provide clear testimony against another geometra. Lesson three is the biggest one of all. Don’t ever pay for anything until you are absolutely sure that you are getting what you are supposed to be getting. In many respects, deferred payment is the local solution to the absence of a functioning civil court system. Foreigners tend to hang themselves because they want to settle their accounts promptly. It would be better to take on board the local saying that: ‘For paying and for dying, there is always time.’ I, I’m afraid, fell into James Stephens’ trap of signing a delega to give him access to our Italian bank account. So by the time we actually came to live in Italy, and discovered our roof leaked, the builders, Petturiti and Fat Boy had long since taken their money and run.

Was the case worth it? In the sense that we could not get a decision, and the settlement barely covers the costs, clearly not. It is really the first of these things that is most depressing. When I started the case, and lots of people said it was a waste of time, my argument was that the justice system is slow, but in the end it functions (perhaps I meant that in the end surely it must function, ho, ho). I told friends that slow justice is not necessarily a bad thing if it discourages the kind of ambulance chasing you get in Anglo-Saxon societies. But in this case the justice system did not function at all. It was pretty unpleasant to see the studied inefficiency of the system at work. How magistrates arrived at a place where they do an hour’s work on a case every seven months I cannot imagine. It is as if management consultants had been called in and told the objective of the system is to achieve nothing.

I spent a lot of time during the case, especially when I had to go to the tribunale, thinking about how much decent people must be suffering because of this system. There is in fact some reasonably hard evidence that this is the case. Contrary to popular opinion, Italians score close to the bottom of the list in European surveys about happiness and satisfaction with their lives. What is particularly interesting is that when researchers attempt to figure out why this is – most often using questionnaires structured by psychologists – the clearest pattern that emerges is that there is some broad link between the level of trust in institutions in a society and aggregate levels of happiness. The latest iteration of a European survey project run by Cambridge University, published in April, had Italy right down at the bottom of the happiness table, the UK somewhere in the middle, and Scandinavian countries up at the top. One of those running the project remarks:

‘The survey shows that trust in society is very important. The countries that scored highest for happiness also reported the highest levels of trust in their governments, laws and each other…

Many of the happiest countries in the survey – the Scandinavian members, Luxembourg and the Netherlands – also come top of the World Bank Governance Indicators, which seek to assess the quality of a country’s government. Likewise those EU 15 countries that scored worst in terms of governance (Italy, Portugal and Greece) tended to come bottom in the happiness survey as well.’

Happiness surveys are notoriously difficult to do well, and one should not place too much credence in a single project. But for me, the findings are in line with arguments that have been made by people like Amartya Sen, and which I have come to find quite convincing. I used to think that important institutions – like a functioning legal system – were essential to economic development and hence, by logical extension, a developed country like Italy must have a functioning legal system (just a slow one). This line of argument is associated with some of the economists who practise what is known as New Institutional Economics, which has become quite fashionable in the past 10 years or so. However, after spending a decade in China, and almost a decade in Italy, I no longer believe in this reasoning. I think economic development can occur despite a highly inefficient legal system; indeed I think there are cases in China where the weakness of legal institutions has even (temporarily) contributed to economic growth by allowing narrow economic interests to trump social considerations. So instead of the ‘precondition of development’ argument about institutions, I now prefer an extension of Sen’s one about democracy. Sen has long argued that the debate about whether democracy is necessary to development is a sterile one, based on a false distinction. Democracy, he says, is a part of development, and so it is pointless debating whether it is also a condition for it. I suspect the same thing is true of some other institutions, including a civil legal system. A legal system in which people can trust makes for a more contented society; all societies seek to develop in the direction of greater contentment; what Italy confronts is in essence a developmental problem.

Anyhow, that seems to have taken us quite a long way from James Stephens and Leo Petturiti, but perhaps someone will follow my drift.

Housekeeping. I hope there will not be too many of these… A comment has been submitted which I am not going to post. The sender: Emilia Maccioni (the wife of Leonardo Petturiti). Reasons for not posting: 1. absence of any substantive content. 2. remarks likely to cause offence to anybody who has suffered, or who has friends or family who have suffered, from any form of mental illness. I don’t mind what people say about me, but general bigotry is off-limits.

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Not so hip

June 19, 2009

 A sad story gets sadder. Our friend Claudia calls to say that Roberta’s funeral is to be held this afternoon. Roberta was one of the many Italian hippies who live in the area between our house and Pietralunga. She died from liver failure related to hepatitis, and complicated by drinking — not least after doctors told her she mustn’t. She was Neapolitan, born to a well-to-do family and she chose the hippy life; she died in her forties. Her octogenarian mother, a quiet, diligent and practical woman who to many seemed indestructible, passed away in March. In October 2007, Roberta’s husband Aldo Bianzino (or perhaps partner, I never asked) died in prison custody after being arrested by police for growing marijuana; he was also in his 40s; a homicide case is, needless to say, outstanding. (There is an outline in Italian on this site and a short letter to the Italian government in English from a pro-legalisation group here.)

So in a beautiful, tiny and now rarely used cemetery in the nearby hills three graves in a row have been dug and filled in the past 18 months for the same small family. Of those living locally, only Aldo and Roberta’s son Rudra (lots of Indian names in Pietralunga…), still of school age, survives.

 Not being partial to a chillum before breakfast and doubting the power of their sacred fire statues, I didn’t know Aldo and Roberta intimately. But Aldo was a more than competent carpenter who made most of the doors and the very fine and very heavy kitchen table in our house. Indeed I wonder what he might have achieved if he hadn’t been so stoned: I once spent five minutes watching him trying to hang a door that he was holding the wrong way up; on another occasion he cut through both a piece of wood and the  tape measure he had laid out next to it with a circular saw, paused for several seconds, and then said: ‘Ooooooooooogh’. While Aldo was anorexically skinny and diffident, Roberta was frenetic, endlessly talkative and a lethal driver in the finest Neapolitan tradition. The two of them were capable of spectacular arguments. Our friend Lele recalls the first time he met them, when they came round to his house to talk about carpentry work. Earlier that day, Aldo had suggested to Roberta that she talked too much. So Roberta had cursed him and sworn that she would never in her life speak again. Lele opened the door to find Aldo, who then sported a mat of long dreadlocks and a bushy beard on top of his tiny frame, dressed in his modified Indian garb and covered from head to foot in sawdust. He said nothing. Next to him, a wild-eyed Roberta produced sounds but no words, and made zipping gestures across her mouth interspersed with occasional gestures towards Aldo. As I recall, they got the job.  

The site of the cemetery is below the house of Raidas, which is the nom de paix (or whatever hippy sobriquets are called) of one of the senior members of the group. In a previous life, he was Mario from Bologna. The house was a priest’s house, attached to a tiny church, and bought from the curia around 20 years ago. If Hollywood was scouting for a setting for a new movie called Love Children of the Appennines, the director could do worse than this place. Outside the little church is a shaded seating area with the biggest cherry tree I know, and below that a simple but elegant garden. There’s also an Indian temple thingy, all very tastefully done.

In reality, from what I have seen, however, the story of the group has not been Hollywood fare. Instead there have been suicides, other premature deaths, and pervasive depression. Of course one can’t make clear judgements, because one doesn’t know what experiences and what predispositions led individuals into the group in the first place.  But it hasn’t been an easy ride.

We follow the coffin from the house down to the cemetery. Although I would have thought that few of those present would claim to be Christian, one of the Pietralunga priests presides and most people participate in the Roman Catholic gesticulations. Roberta is laid to rest by the gate of the cemetery, which is walled. She is separated from Aldo by her mother which, while they undoubtedly loved one another, may be a sensible arrangement. Flowers, mostly those of ginestra, and candles are set out on the grave. It is swelteringly hot, but people take their time to say goodbye. And then they wander, in ones and twos, back up to the house. I talk with people I haven’t seen for some time. Lele chats with the lawyer in the Aldo homicide case. And then I make my excuses and leave.

The situation with respect to Rudra is potentially a huge mess, not least because of Italy’s patchy and idiosyncratic welfare state. But I suspect that it is one of those situations that is so horrible that somebody in the system will do something. Roberta’s brother is willing to move down permanently from Munich, where he has lived for many years, to look after Rudra while he finishes his schooling. But he needs a steady job in order to do so. My guess is that the Pietralunga Commune, which knows all about the case, will find him one.

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Shitty ending

May 19, 2009

My premonitions about Dr. Cenci’s determination to reduce the number of outstanding court cases in Citta di Castello prove to be somewhat accurate. On the morning of May 19, 2009, our case against James Fat Boy Stephens, his geometra Leonardo Petturiti, and the building firm once known as LAME (boy does that look like a warning in hindsight, even though it means ‘blades’ in Italian) ends, not with a bang, but with a whimper.

It is at least fitting that Giorgio Merli, the frequently drunken builder who was probably most responsible for leaving gaps on our roof where water-proof roofing felt would more normally be applied, is present on the part of the now-defunct LAME (reborn as LACOS, in case they are on your roof as you read). On the other hand Giorgio is perhaps just one of life’s sad people; it is his brother who is studiously unpleasant and who perjured himself unashamedly in court. To Giorgio’s left is Fat Boy and to Fat Boy’s left is his bouffant court jester, little Leo Petturiti.

Cenci begins the way he means to continue: ‘Is it possible for the parties to arrive at an agreement? This case has been going on for nine years.’ He says this as if it is the fault of an organisation other than the one he works for.

Fat Boy’s Perugia lawyer offers Euro7,000. This is against an estimate (based on standardised, state-approved costs) of something over Euro13,000 that was calculated for the cost of repairs (most of them now done) to the roof. I say no, for two reasons. The first is that the Italian legal system being what it is we only brought one case against Fat Boy, when in fact we were unhappy about all sorts of things that happened at our house before we sacked him. This leads to the second, key reason, that what I really want is a decision by the court that says that what these people have done is wrong, legally wrong, and that ultimately we have a judicial system that establishes that.  The defendants haven’t been conciliatory for the past eight years, they didn’t give a toss when the roof leaked in 12 places and my wife was pregnant (Petturiti finds this remarkably funny), they have sought at every turn to prolong the case, and it is not really a question of money, it is a question of principle and of being able to say that dishonesty does catch up with you.

Unfortunately, Dr. Cenci and I don’t seem to be on quite the same wavelength. His overriding concern appears to me to be to get the case closed — at least I don’t like the faces he makes when I suggest the court moves to a ruling, which would involve reading all the files (it is quite clear he has not read anything so far). Fat Boy’s Perugia lawyer ups the offer a bit, Cenci talks about the case going on for many more years, my lawyer points out that if Cenci allows the other side to send the court-appointed geometra to our house a third time — as has been requested — it will likely be two more years before we get even an initial decision which, of course, they can then appeal.

Numbers are discussed in the background. I am fairly sure that at one point Fat Boy offered more than I actually accepted. I am not really concentrating. I am thinking that I can’t face more of this when we now have estate ageent Davide Leonardi of Leonardi SRL to deal with (more anon). After nine years I have all the evidence I need that the local court system is everything that caricature books about Italy indicate. I have what I need for anecdotal purposes and it is time to start doing something useful. For nine years I respected the court, waited for it to do its job, and did not publicise what Fat Boy and his crew get up to. The few preparatory entries on this blog have not been publicised and they have not, according to the blog software, been viewed. Now that can change.

I accept Euro9,000 and ask Cenci a question: ‘Why is it that with a system like this there isn’t more crime in Italy? Why doesn’t every thief in Europe come here?’ It is a cheap parting shot, but it is also a reasonably serious question. Luckily for Italy, the predictions of mathematised models beloved of contemporary social science rarely stand up to empirical tests — if it were the case, this place would truly be an anarchic hell.

Finally, the farcical addendum. There is, of course, inevitably, a farcical addendum. After we leave, our lawyer recommends that we apply for state compensation that exists for people whose legal cases exceed the current duration ‘norm’ (around three or four years). My immediate response is that there is no way that I am taking taxpayers’ money to compensate me for the incompetence and inefficiency of the state. The lawyer’s argument, however, is that this is one’s only available form of legal protest against a system that does not work. We discuss, and eventually agree to go ahead, on the basis that if we get the money we will not keep it. The compensation is around Euro1,500 for every ‘excessive’ year in court. If you would like to recommend a deserving local charity, please do so…

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Conclusion? No, intermezzo.

May 4, 2009

Well, let’s hope, after just the eight years, that it is a little more than mezzo. At 9.50am on the appointed day I arrive at the tribunale for the ‘conciliation’ intervention by Citta di Castello’s brand new, and only, fully toga’d (as opposed to honorary) magistrate, Dr. Cenci.

Our lawyer has a stand-in because she has an ’emergency’ in Perugia. At 10am both the lawyer of James Fat Boy Stephens, shared with his scrofulous geometra, and the lawyer of the builders are present. It appears to be a fortuitious beginning. But where are their foul charges?

The lawyers for the opposition announce that they ‘interpreted’ the magistrate’s letter as not requiring the presence of their clients. In other words, that a conciliation would be conducted without the presence of those to be conciliated.

So does Fat Boy’s lawyer have a conciliation offer? Not really. He too is a stand-in lawyer and has not read the file. He starts to read it. The builders’ lawyer suggests that his clients could come up to our house and do a piccolo lavoretto (a nice use of the double diminutive: a little small piece of work — perhaps adjusting the position of a plant pot, or somesuch). I suggest to him that having builders who left you with a roof that leaked in 12 places, who then came back for just half a day under threat of litigation and still left a roof that leaked in 12 places, come back again is not powerfully appealing. ‘Ho capito,’ he says.

I divert myself watching a male, 40-something lawyer whose gait, suit and shoes mean you simply know he would deflower your 14-year-old daughter (should you have one) given one-tenth of a chance. Does he like adolescents to call him papi, like someone else we know?  He has already had his uninvited arm around two women in the magistrate’s ante-chamber in half an hour. I ponder whether he lives with his mum and decide probably not, though I would refuse a significant wager on the matter.

  

At 11.24 by the watch of the tall and curly-haired Dr. Cenci, we enter his studio. He kicks off with a pleasantry about it ‘not being like this in England’. I agree that it is not quite like this in England and immediately wish that I had not. It seems to indicate I have something against Italy or Italians. I don’t. I like where I live and I like most of the people. I just, increasingly, don’t like the self-important, state-maintained professional classes: lawyers, geometras, notaries, a large sub-set of doctors, and possibly a significant sub-set of magistrates. Italians moan about their political class. I suspect their politicians are merely a reflection of a more common cancer: the well-dressed, self-serving, indolent, amoral and unprofessional ‘professional’. 

 

Inevitably, Dr. Cenci isn’t fazed that the others have ‘interpreted’ no need to show up. I suppose it is only like a state surveyor who spends three times the stipulated maximum time to do a court-mandated survey or a lawyer who fails to show for a trial: we mustn’t be judgemental, especially in court.

 

The builders’ lawyer asks that the surveyor be sent back to the house for a third time. Having not got what his clients wanted from the second visit, which the builders also requested and then failed to show up for, this is only logical. We point out, however, that it is also an absurd request. Fat Boy’s lawyer, from a (presumably expensive by local standards) Perugia firm, is a little more subtle. Although a stand-in, he seems to have read enough of the file in the hour-and-a-half waiting time to be concerned for his clients in the event of a final decision. So he suggests, in efficaciously unctuous terms, that if the magistrate deems it sensible and appropriate that all parties come before him, then perhaps we should do exactly that.

 

In normal times, this would probably buy another year and keep the lawyerly clock ticking happily round. But these are not normal times. The mercurial Dr. Cenci opens his diary and responds that he’ll see us all in a week. Mamma mia! Not since a pope was last found to be the father of multiple children has such a shocker been laid before central Italy. After a moment, the first lawyer responds that he cannot possibly do next week. Then the week after! The other lawyer responds that he cannot do that. Then the week after that!. They have nowhere to run. The date is fixed for just three weeks hence, a fraction of a nanosecond in Italian legal time. The sheer audaciousness of the diary entry sends an electric buzz through the building.

 

But what will happen? My cynical self says not much that is good. As usual, I leave the tribunale feeling physically sick. I spend the afternoon gardening.    

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Justice has a lovely coat

April 22, 2009

Italians in central Italy, I have been thinking, look ever more tawdry, even dowdy in their fashion choices.

Is this because current, ‘youth’ fashion is tawdry? Trousers hanging off one’s arse; shirts with gormless, nonsensical English words on them – as I write I am looking at someone with ‘wool’ emblazoned on one side of his chest and ‘rich’ on the other; all set off with ridiculous gold or silver trainers.

Or is it that I have become aware of the tendency of Italians, with their reflexive herd instinct in matters superficial (as opposed to wars), to fall off the edge of the fashion cliff? The example par excellence of recent years is their collective capacity to wear more and more stupid sunglasses. Look at me, cara! I look like an ant. And it only cost me Euro200! No, look at me! I have one-piece wrap-around shades the width of a small road. No, no, look at me! I have the name of a company written in diamante down both sides of my head and it only cost me Euro300!

Or is it that after 20 years of on-again-off-again economic crisis and negligible productivity gains, Italians look more crappy because they are simply running out of money?

Despite the general modish malaise, there is in Citta di Castello (and doubtless in every other central Italian town of similar scale) one place where you will still see people dressed beautifully. It is the Tribunale, as I was reminded on a recent visit.

The local magistracy has moved to refurbished premises between Castello’s twin central squares. The improved setting only serves to point up the exquisite sartorial choices of the assembled lawyers and their magistrate peers: behold the delightfully tailored skirts; wonder at the aggressively fashionable yet sufficiently formal trousers; marvel at the cleverly-fitted, nipped-and-tucked jackets; the shoes, of course, go without saying.

It is all too easy to forget amid the sartorial ecstasy that one does not only go to a courtroom for a fashion show. Indeed I did not on this occasion. I was there for the latest round in our epic (just the eight years so far) case against James Fat Boy Stephens, his scrofulous geometra sidekick, and their Neapolitan builder friends, who at the end of the decade before this one left us with a roof that leaked in 12 places. A naïve person might think it a relatively straightforward case. As I said, a naïve person…

For those who have not had the pleasure, the experience of an Italian court is not unlike an Italian church service. People wander in and out at will, talking somewhat quietly and respectfully, but without – if truth be told – ever really quite believing in the institution.

On arrival on this occasion, it looked like standard fare. The magistrate dealing with whoever pushed themselves gently to the front of the queue. The magistrate wholly unable to remember details of specific cases — not surprising when hearings last about an hour and the gap between them is about a year. The lawyer of one of the counterparties failing to show up. Our lawyer regarding this as entirely reasonable – the other lawyer is, after all, ‘a colleague’. And lots and lots and lots of hanging around.

But it was not standard fare this time. Just when the presiding (honorary) magistrate was expected to say that she was accepting no further evidence and would now make a decision in the case, it was announced that Castello’s senior magistrate – the one who is togato (who’s got, at least rhetorically, the ‘toga’ of the career judge) – is personally taking over all cases dating from 2002 and earlier in order to clear them up. This has a strong whiff, in the contemporary political climate, of Berlusconi-goes-to-Naples-and-sorts-out-the-rubbish-in-five-minutes about it. And it’s a bit bizarre coming just when the sitting magistrate was (in theory) about to be forced to make up her mind anyway. But there is nothing we can do. We must go with the spettacolo, return in a couple of weeks and see what the beautifully-dressed ones have in store for us.

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Living the caricature

April 6, 2009

The time of great garden busy-ness is upon us. In the space of a couple of weeks, the garden has switched from winter deadness to a condition in which one suspects that plants – particularly grass – can be seen to be growing. The full range of weaponry, led by strimmer and tractor-lawn mower, are mobilised to beat back nature’s onslaught.

It is a bunch of work. The last week was particularly full-on. Fortunately, Italy offered up a couple of her exquisite absurdities to remind one that in the end ‘Why bother?’ is the most rational approach to life.

First, the postwoman arrived with one of those threatening, pale green, registered-post envelopes. It was a demand for payment of a parking fine from Pisa that was written on 23 February 2000.

A quick trawl through my files revealed that the Commune di Pisa already demanded payment of this fine in June 2004. At that point, the Pisa municipal police demanded I pay them Euro135,77 to reflect the original fine of just over Euro56, plus four years of late payment. Today, I am delighted to discover, they are offering to settle the whole thing for Euro111, 55 — a reduction of almost 20 percent on the 2004 figure.

This is most welcome, but leaves a difficult choice: should I settle now, or should I wait another five years in the hope of paying Euro90? A momentary reflection on the fiscal condition of the nation convinces me to cough up. I will, at least, hold my chin high about town, sure in the knowledge that I have both been dealt a bargain and that I have done my civic duty.

 Unfortunately, I now remember why I never paid the 2004 demand. Neither of us was even in the country. But the wife suddenly figures out the answer. In 2000, we had just bought — brand new — the car that incurred the fine and, for some bizarre reason, decided to leave the keys with our hippy neighbour. The hippy’s family, we subsequently learned, comes from Pisa. So, it seems, the hippy borrowed our car and took a trip home. (What was wrong with his own wreck?). When he got a parking fine, the hippy presumably ate it, smoked it, or tore it up into decorative shreds and tried to sell it to a tourist.

I had been thinking that the lesson of the demand from Pisa was that one should only pay Italian parking fines when fully convenient, if at all. But that is only the smaller of two, separate lessons. The second, bigger lesson is to never, ever, ever leave your car keys with a hippy.

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