The New York Times

Monday, January 31, 2000

Italians Argue Over Efforts to Make Trials Fairer

By ALESSANDRA STANLEY

ROME, Jan. 30 -- Italy prepared for the year 2000 by passing laws to speed up its notoriously slow judicial process and to protect the rights of defendants better.

But so far, those milestones seem almost buried by a clamorous debate over whether justice in Italy is independent or ruled by politics.

Last week, politicians on the left and the right have been obsessively re-examining cases past, seeking to rewrite two of the most turbulent chapters of recent Italian history: the terrorism of the 1970's and 1980's -- a period so violent it is known as the "years of lead" -- and Tangentopoli, or Bribesville, the criminal investigations into a huge web of corruption and bribery that in the early 1990's brought down the centrist Christian Democratic party and its Socialist allies.

Those two very different cases have at least one thing in common -- critics on each side insist that the investigations were politically biased. And those sentiments, echoed most heatedly in Parliament, highlight one of the weaknesses that undermine efforts at legal reform.

"There is now a real effort to make changes in the legal system," said Vittorio Grevi, director of the C. Beccaria Institute of Law and Criminal Procedure in Pavia. "But the real problem is that there is such deep distrust of the magistrates who apply the law."

The tortuous legal saga of Adriano Sofri and two co-defendants, radical leftist intellectuals who were convicted in 1990 of conspiring to kill a police inspector in 1972 and maintained their innocence throughout eight different trials, is a cause c l bre that has long polarized Italy.

Dario Fo, a Nobel Prize winner, wrote "Accidental Death of an Anarchist" based on one of the elements of the Sofri case. When a Venice court upheld the convictions this week, there was an outpouring of anger and distress.

Walter Veltroni, who leads the Democrats of the Left, the party of Prime Minister Massimo D'Alema, said the verdict must be "respected" but added that "the whole truth of that unjustifiable murder must come out and the guilty be brought to justice," a statement that clearly implied that all the trials and judges' verdicts so far had not.

"Confidence in the justice system has so deteriorated that people feel they can just dismiss a verdict they don't agree with," said Massimo Pavarini, a law professor at the University of Bologna.

Ironically, however, it is the center-left that usually argues that magistrates in Italy are impartial enforcers of the law, and that any attempt to rein in their power is a political assault by politicians who fear corruption charges.

The lower house of Parliament on Wednesday approved a parliamentary committee to investigate Tangentopoli, in which hundreds of businessmen and politicians were charged and convicted, though only a few served prison time. It is not clear yet exactly what is under scrutiny: Italian socialists and center-right politicians on the committee want to show that the prosecutors were overly zealous and politically motivated.

The center-left, including the government of Mr. D'Alema, hopes to show that if anything, the prosecutors did not probe deeply enough. The government reluctantly agreed to the commission, not because it believed that there was any need to re-examine Tangentopoli, but because it wanted to woo socialist backing for its fragile center-left coalition.

Political mistrust is so entrenched that few court decisions are viewed as unassailable. At the funeral of the former Socialist prime minister, Bettino Craxi, who fled to Tunisia before he was convicted on corruption charges stemming from Tangentopoli, some of his supporters hurled insults at government representatives who attended the service.

But not even his supporters maintain that Mr. Craxi, who was convicted in two separate trials, was innocent. Instead, they insist that every political party accepted bribes and illegal contributions, and Mr. Craxi was unfairly singled out.

The opposition leader, Silvio Berlusconi, a former prime minister and media tycoon, has led the campaign to limit the power of prosecutors. There are legal experts who agree that prosecutors in Italy have too much power and that defendants' rights need to be strengthened. But Mr. Berlusconi's motives can hardly be described as impartial. He has been convicted three times on charges of false accounting and illegal campaign financing, and is currently awaiting trial on accusations that he sought to bribe judges.

For all the political squabbling, however, Parliament did manage to pass two reforms before the end of 1999. One law reduces to one, from three, the number of judges who preside over most criminal trials. It is aimed at speeding up trials that in Italy can drag on for years.

The other, passed in November, is called "just trial." Most importantly, the law obliges witnesses to testify in court and be cross-examined, as is customary in the United States. (Before, prosecutors could rely on affidavits by informants signed during the police investigation, even those that reported hearsay.)

The Italian legal system's dependence on the testimony of hostile witnesses, most notably on "pentiti " -- defendants who testify in exchange for liberty or shorter sentences -- has long been under scrutiny.

In many cases, such testimony was used in trials in which the defense could not cross-examine the accusers.

And the Italian witness protection program allowed several pentiti to continue to commit crimes while guests of the state.

The acquittal of Giulio Andreotti, the former Prime Minister whose two trials on charges that he collaborated with the Mafia while in office dragged on for years, was one of the most visible blows to the credibility of pentiti.

In a less noticed but equally telling ruling, a court in Palermo earlier this month acquitted seven men charged with a 1995 bank robbery -- and handed their accusers, mobsters turned state's witnesses, far stiffer sentences than the ones they received from plea bargaining.