CONTENTS:

Preface by Leonardo Sciascia

The Courage of Fear

A City Under Siege

The Appointment With the Violent

Flowers in the Court Room

In the Bunker

The Next One Will Be Adelaide Aglietta

Justice For Giorgiana Masi, Justice For Marshal Berardi

The Via Fani Massacre

The Question of Self-Defense

The Debate Is Open

Tragedy in the Country, Illegality in Parliament, Boredom in the Courtroom

Curcio: An Act of Revolutionary Justice

Friar Machine-gun

The Referendum Campaign: The Schizophrenia of a Jurywoman

The Word Is With the Contending Parties

The Court Retires, My Job Is Finished

The Reason For This Book

ABSTRACT: Adelaide Aglietta, a woman of Turin, joined the Radical Party (PR) in 1974. After being active in the CISA (Italian Centre For Sterilisation and Abortion) for legalising and liberalising abortion and in the Piedmont branch of the Radical Party, she was the leading candidate on the Radical election list for Turin in the June 20, 1976 elections. The following November she was elected secretary of the PR and reconfirmed in that post for 1978 at the Bologna Congress. Her name was drawn by lots in March 1978 to be a juror in the Turin trial of the Red Brigades and she accepted the task after more than one hundred other citizens had refused it, thus allowing the trial to take place.

Thus Adelaide Aglietta was the first secretary of a party to be a member of a popular jury: her diary originates from this experience on the borderline between public and private life, from the tensions and the contradictions that are necessarily part of the role of juror, above all in a political trial.

At present she is a deputy to the European Parliament.

(<> - Adelaide Aglietta - Preface by Leonardo Sciascia - Milano Libri Edizioni - February 1979)

THE REASON FOR THIS BOOK

I hesitated more than once when some of my friends and the directors of Milano Libri offered me the possibility of writing this book. Probably I had the desire to put behind me as quickly as possible a period that was certainly far from happy. But there were also perplexities of another kind. Above all what interested me and seemed worthy of reflection was our encounter as Radicals, libertarians and pacifists with the "violent" BR, an encounter that was critical for me in the first weeks of the trial. But was it possible to write it limiting myself to my experience and the events of the trial? Or was there rather the danger of writing just another of the many books in which judgements are superimposed on the facts, neither a diary nor an essay?

For the same reason I excluded at once the idea of a book which strictly documented the events of the trial. Paradoxically this trial was not important so much for having taken place as for the possibility that it might not be possible to hold it. Since in the very moment that our idea won out - that it was necessary to make sure that this trial and all other political trials were held - its importance diminished. And it diminished to the degree that it was led back to the state of a normal procedure, that is to say into the course of common procedural and constitutional guarantees. In the midst of a thousand difficulties this indubitably occurred and it was a momentary defeat for both those who, within the regime, intended to make a special trial out of it, and for those who wanted to turn it into a test of strength between the regime and the BR (and there were some on both sides), betting on the negative consequences of a failure.

In the end, I resolved the problem by adopting the formula of a diary, that is letting the facts speak as I experienced them, and of re-reading and offering them again to the reader not in an appendix, but inserted into the narrative and selected too from the personal standpoint so that they would reflect the importance they had had for me in this affair - not only the facts and documents of the trial, but those as well, personal and political, that took place on the outside during the trial and which involved me as a Radical and the secretary of a party.

I tried to avoid censoring as much as possible both sentiments and feelings, as well as events in the trial and among the jury, and I hope I have done so without falling into the all-too personal and violating the reserve which the law imposes on me.

And so the protagonists of this book are the defendants who contested the trial in the name of their condition as revolutionaries, and the lawyers and judges who, through difficulties and contradictions, allowed it to be held and brought to a conclusion.

But there are other protagonists too: my Radical comrades who also participated emotionally in my decision in the first weeks of the trial and form whom I often felt separated and distant in the long period that followed; the victims of the revolutionary violence of the armed party as well as of the repressive violence of the state; the daily press which in this affair, in the Moro kidnapping, and in the referendum campaign behaved, with rare exceptions, like the press of the regime; the majority in Parliament and the Rome government with their political and legislative choices.

Among all these, two protagonists take on particular prominence: the PCI [Communists] whom I will reprove for having consented to and desired the militarisation of Turin for months, its being caught in a spiral of fear, and the dynamics of suspicion and terror. On this had speculated the forces of the new power and the new supporters of order, of an old order which we have been fighting for well over thirty years. For weeks and months suspicion and terror have become the tools for a consensus in every aspect of our city's civil live, in its neighbourhoods, its schools, its factories. It has been a scientific operation that many of us have tried to oppose and which many of us will not forget.

The other protagonist is the electorate of June 11, that which - in large part Communist, Socialist and authentically Christian - voted YES to the abrogation of the Reale law and public financing, (1) but also those who voted NO. It is the same electorate which the parliamentary majority wanted to keep from expressing its opinion at all costs. The fact that it had been able to express its opinion allowed the logic of democracy rather than of violence to prevail and be reaffirmed, at least for the time being. The fall of Leone and the election of Pertini were other small signs of a change, signs that things can take a different tack in this country.

I will not draw up a balance of this affair. The balance, if a balance is possible, is up to the reader. If I had been a regular juror rather than an auxiliary one, would the sentence have been different? Perhaps not. With regard to the positions in the trial of Lazagna, Levati, Borgna and others, it is certain that my doubts would have prevailed over the certainties of the evidence presented by the prosecution and the testimony of Girotto. (2)

With regard to my experience on the jury (without prejudice to the fact that the defendant's right to a jury of his peers is a progressive factor in juridical evolution), my impression is that the promiscuous composition of such juries puts the jurors in an embarrassing position, above all when it comes to interpreting the norms and in the procedural choices, by risking their being put at the mercy of the judges. But this subject needs to be considered elsewhere.

I don't know if I have succeeded, but it seemed to me that the only thing that gave interest to this book was the attempt to transmit to readers the singular circumstances in which I found myself and the many contradictions I had to face: as a party secretary suddenly called upon to do jury duty; as a juror who had to apply norms and procedures which she opposed as a private citizen and which, as a militant Radical, were being applied to her in other trials; to have participated in the events of the trial and at the same time, even if indirectly, in the political events that were taking place outside the courtroom.

There were moments of schizophrenia which I tried to avoid and overcome at no small personal price.

In the dramatic events of these months, the trial, for the rest, was - along with other dramatic and sometimes tragic happenings - a piece in a larger mosaic. To this network of facts and events I have tried to bear witness.

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TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

1) The Reale law is a public order law severely limiting personal freedom and individual rights with the excuse of fighting terrorism. The public financing refers to that of political parties which the Radical Party vehemently opposed. The PR refused to utilise its share finance its own operating expenses, but eventually decided the use of these funds for such initiatives as referendums would be legitimate.

2) A secret service agent who infiltrated into the BR.