> - Adelaide Aglietta - Preface by Leonardo Sciascia - Milano Libri Edizioni - February 1979)THE CONTENDING PARTIES HAVE THE WORD
Thursday, May 25. It is now the plaintiffs, the public prosecutor, the defense lawyers and finally the defendants who have the word. Afterwards it will go to the jury.
I follow this last phase of the trial in a detached way, with my mind on the election campaign. In the morning, tired and sleepy I am at the Lamarmora barracks. In the afternoons, evenings and night I am always travelling.
Wednesday, May 31. Whereas the harangues of the plaintiffs are predictable, there is some suspense regarding the public prosecutor's summing up. I prepare myself to follow it in a state of mind difficult to define, but certainly not serene. The P.P's arguments are not always easy to understand because they are, as always, presented in a highly technical manner, but they systematically follow the arguments of Caselli: The charges are based on the discovery of the hide-outs which are distinguished for order of importance according to the material that was found in them. The hide-outs are the meeting point for the documents that support the charges and the identity of the accused. What are still missing however are precise proofs of the individual responsibility for the particular facts.
Thursday and Friday, June 1-2. The P.P's harangue continues unabatingly for three days. He tries to trace the history of the original BR nucleus and the crimes that we are judging, but he doesn't succeed in surpassing these limits. Meanwhile the jurors have called a press conference to announce the fact that, possibly because of the unclear norms, two jurors have not been paid in full due to their enforced absence from work, even though the government has not yet recompensed them for the duties which they were called to perform.
At last we are getting close to the end of the P.P's summing-up. When Moschella mentions the name of Carletti, Buonavita flares up inside the cage [where the defendants are locked up]: "I forbid you to mention her". Franceschini echoes his protest: "We allow you to live because you are useful to us; you are too stupid". It is the last feeble attempt to start a skirmish.
Friday morning, there is a tomb-like silence and the P.P asks for the sentence. I am overwhelmed by anguish: I imagine the chains, the cage, the visits to the prison. And I feel indignant when I hear that for the women (Nadia Mantovani in particular) lighter sentences are requested since they were involved in the affair only because of their personal ties to their respective companions. They are not even allowed the dignity of their own ideas!
At the end of the hearing I look around me: I notice that I am not the only juror who is pale and shaken.
In the following days I hardly have time to peruse the newspapers, immersed as I am in the election campaign. To my astonishment journalists and the usual experts discuss the P.P Moschella's requests for sentences which seem lenient to all of them. Perhaps only those who are directly involved in a trial can lucidly understand exactly what it means to lose one's freedom and that years of detention are not something abstract
but a hard reality to be lived through day after day; and how, this time, it has not been said that these defendants are not the ones who have covered the country with blood during the last few years and that there are no harder penalties for the crimes with which they have been charged. Once again it is really true: the function of the press has been fundamental...
On Sunday I make the rounds of the assemblies in Piedmont and for one day I find again the revitalising contact with the people and my comrades and manage to shake off the load of sadness and opacity that weighs on me.
We are about to face the last two weeks of the trial: my impatience is now extreme. But during these days I will manage to stabilise my personal relations, perhaps only through silence, established during these two months in the Lamarmora barracks.
Monday-Tuesday, June 5-6. The lawyers for the defense of Borgna , Levati and Carletti begin their harangues. The application of the new law on abortion also begins with the announcement of the unpreparedness of the hospitals, the doctors' objections of conscience which is much greater than was foreseen, and of the objective difficulties of applying this law.
I believe I thanked the attorney Bianca Guidetti-Serra for her harangue in defense of Carletti. With her lucidity, the precision of her legal arguments, with her serious evaluation of the personal, moral and social history of the person and her motivations, she succeeded in giving an important example of how the law, above and beyond legal norms and penal codes, can never be disconnected from the historical and social realities to which it is applied - all of this without, obviously, neglecting the legal certainties which are the foundation of civil co-existence.
The figure of Bianca, apart from her credibility and the esteem which she enjoys not only Turin, but in all Italian courts,with her serene and reserved presence, her correctness and decisiveness in all these long months, has been for me at least a point of reference in this difficult and tormented trial that was often misrepresented from the outside.
Wednesday, June 7. The attorney Zancan gets up to speak. for six hours he will keep the jury and the courtroom mesmerised with his harangue in defense of the lawyer Lazagna. He presents certain and incontestable doubts, serious ones too, concerning the theses of the prosecution. At the end of his defense, which had the virtue of detaching itself from strictly juridical terminology so that it was comprehensible to everyone, there was great discussion among the jurors on the merit of his arguments.
At this point of the proceedings a true dialogue opens between several members of the jury and me. The awareness of the limits of a trial (not only this one), the difficulties of remaining within the legal bounds of an inquiry as full of holes as this one, the weakness of some of the evidence and thus the consciousness of the anguishing responsibility of judging have finally imposed themselves on the conscience of other jurors. The barriers have fallen which had sometimes inevitably separated us during these months.
With one of the jury women in particular solidarity is formed again: from a position which I would call superficial, she has arrived at an understanding of class realities and social injustice which has generated the desire in her to reach a non-discriminatory kind of justice based on real facts and proofs uninfluenced by preconceptions. The initial difficulties caused in part by a vague resentment in her of my public position, which brought me publicity, have fallen and made room for an encounter, a serious and loyal relationship.
Barbaro, who is usually reserved, lets himself go today and becomes confidential. Suddenly at lunch time he had ordered a long adjournment of the trial. It had never before happened and we are at a loss to explain it. When I meet him in the afternoon I ask him why. He excuses himself and tells me that he felt he had to go home because his wife had called to say that his daughter had had an anxiety crisis. "I spoked to her and she is calm now. I left her, as always, listening to the radio". Thus I learn that his daughter is an assiduous listener to Radical Radio. I think about the life that this man and his family have been forced to lead for years, prisoners of their bodyguard and the constant menace of the BR.
At the end of the hearing I make a hasty exit from the barracks. As has been happening now for several days, a few friends are waiting for me there with a car and at once we begin the rushing round for the election campaign. Only a few days are left until the voting and the activity has intensified. At six in the afternoon, between one private radio and one private TV broadcast, I run to improvise one of the last public assemblies in a hall in the centre of town. As usual whenever my presence is announced the unusual squads of police and plain-clothes men leap to the eye who mix among the public. I recognise them easily, some of them having been stubbornly playing (badly) for months the part of interested citizens at the trial in the section of the courtroom reserved for the general public.
In speaking I work off my tensions and my worries. I dwell on the subject of public order. At the end of the meeting a high police official comes up to me whom I have already had occasion to recognise. He says: "We know how right you are... the Reale laws (1) are for public disorder and not public order. There are a lot of us, you know, who are going to vote YES on Sunday..." He says it in a low voice, but he says it. And that is what counts.
Friday, June 9. The summings up of the defense lawyers continue. It is Arnaldi's turn for some of the defendants accused of minor crimes. He tries to analyse the reasons for the rise of terrorism, to bring out the defendants' motivations, to trace them back to the social and moral values which they intended to express aside from the deeds and behaviour that they caused. For these motives he asks that, in a secondary way, they be accorded the attenuating considerations usually accorded to "crimes of honour" and other such.
The reaction of the press is surprising. On Saturday I have been at the radio since the day before, conducting a live broadcast in view of the election coming up on Sunday: While I am there I read in the newspapers an attack on the defense attorney Arnaldi which fills me with dismay and makes me realise how the outside world has viewed this trial as a "special" trial. Certainly that is how the press has presented it to the public. Together with Guiso these are the only two summing-ups that try to look deeper into the phenomenon of terrorism, the origins and development of the BR. Guiso speaks of the open-minded use of the penalties, that distinguishes between revolutionaries and terrorists and who also appeals to the particular social value of the defendants motivations.
These arguments are interesting and would have deserved more consideration from a press that, in this phase too, has limited itself to giving a view of the defendants and of the events that have been presented kin this trial which is either expedient for the political or is "folkloristic" in nature.
Arnaldi, who was in the Resistance and has largely been active as a trial lawyer for leftist and union militants, has been insulted in all the newspapers. The same has happened to Guiso. It almost seems that the defense is expected to turn itself an extension of the prosecution.
Sunday-Monday, June 11-12. I follow the voting and he ballots of the referendum. Monday afternoon at the city hall, the faces of the Communist officials and councillors are always ballots for the first referendum, the one on public financing (2), the announcements of the results is suspended. These are the signs, which then become certainties, that public financing has been defeated in Turin. 53.8% of the public has voted for its abrogation. Even the 27% against the Reale law is higher than in the rest of Italy. The city of workers par excellence has made a serious reply to certain factitious kinds of propaganda without content and founded on misinformation, deceit and political lynching.
In the evening in Piazza Carlo Alberto, hundreds of people gather spontaneously to celebrate this great political victory. With an improvised megaphone I begin to speak, but I cannot contain my emotion. Dozens of comrades embrace me. The tears I shed may perhaps be the great knot inside me that is beginning to thaw, the beginning of my renewed faith in people, in their maturity and their civility. I have regained my desire to continue fighting, to affirm in my personal and political behaviour those hopes that I no longer see as the property of only a few, but of an ever-growing many. Now it is necessary to express and to represent this opposition which has so clearly come to light on June 11.
After this euphoric demonstration I return to the party headquarters. They call me from Rome. They want me to make a declaration for Radical Radio. Gianfanco and Emma, they tell me, are at Piazza Navona with Mimmo Pinto (3). They too are celebrating the results. Marco Pannella, instead, has been waiting for the results out in the square in Trieste where the election campaign is already in full swing and where the Radical Party will win 6% of the vote on June 24.
On the following days , at the Lamarmora barracks too, the pessimistic atmosphere will give way to euphoria and enthusiasm.
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TRANSLATOR'S NOTES
1) The Reale law was a public order decree that severely limited individual liberties and rights with the excuse of fighting terrorism.
2) The public financing of political parties which the Radical Party strongly opposed and, for its part, refused to accept.
3) A deputy from the far left party Lotta Continua who was elected on the Radical lists.
