ABSTRACT: The author deplores the fact that in Italy "killers... leave prison happily after serving minimal time and people who have killed no one... remain instead to serve full and exorbitant terms. He then compares what happens in Mafia cases and in those of terrorism where youths who are not guilty of murder and who are disorganised and in marginal positions must serve exorbitant sentences only because they cannot show themselves to be "repentant" by denouncing others. He gives a detailed account of the case of the terrorist Laura Motta who has gone through incredible judicial and penal itineraries despite the fact that today she is "a different person", well aware of the errors of terrorism since unsuspected times.

(CORRIERE DELLA SERA, January 2, 1987)

It seems inconceivable in the light of law and common sense that killers - who have been identified and who have confessed - happily leave prison after serving minimal time while people who have not killed but merely participated in actions more demonstrative than lethal, are left to serve the full time of sentences that seem exorbitant and heavy in comparison to the laughably light ones imposed on assassins. But that is what happens in our blessed country, where laws are distancing themselves more and more from justice and their application can be arbitrary and arrogant.

We do not know how many cases there are, of youths who lived in the wretched illusion of being able to make war on the state and win, who had a foolish taste for plots and clandestine action, and who, however deluded and foolish they may have been, were the children - one must be honest enough to recognise that - of our indignation. We do not know how many of them there may still be in prison - it must be said - for not having killed anyone, and which is to say for having been on the sidelines of the terrorist groups and for having practised forms of terrorism which can be called imitative and almost symbolic - far, therefore, from the much more lethal and organised kind that had specific human targets, accurately chosen victims. Youths who due to their marginal positions in comparison to the centres of subversion, due to their disorganised spontaneity, allowed the police to capture them all at a certain point, and who thus had no chance to present denunciations against others which the laws and the jud

ges consider the "true" and efficacious repentance.

This is a curious and distorted notion of repentance which has nothing to do with conscience, with the arousal or demonstration of human feelings and moral principles, but is the exact synonym of denunciation and as such is denied to the last remaining member of a gang unless he decides to denounce someone that did not belong to the gang. But this subject has been treated more competently and clearly by Giuliano Vassalli in an essay entitled »Repentance and its Perils published in the monthly Mondo Operaio (November 1985) which deserves wider distribution .

Mrs. Laura Motta, who had been part of an early and marginal terrorist group from which she had distinctly disassociated herself (and precisely at the time when terrorism entered its most organised, virulent and efficient phase), once arrested together with all the other members of her group, was in no position to offer justice information other than against herself by adding to the accusations already made against her of having participated in an attack on the prison that was being built at Bergamo, the fact of having trained in target practice. But no consideration was given to this act of self-accusal.

When arrested in October 1980, already married and the mother of twins, and by now devoted only to the care of her family, she was given provisional liberty in May 1981. Her physical and mental health badly damaged (the removal of a tumor and recovery in a psychiatric ward), after her release from prison she had begun slowly to get back into her routine of family life and work in her home in Comiso when she was struck by another arrest warrant (and one cannot understand how they managed to ignore the fact that she was released because of her very bad health) and back to prison she went. Fortunately for less than a month. Then back to the family, her studies and work in a nursery school.

And lo, on Christmas Eve she is arrested again. The Court of Cassation upheld the sentence of the Milan Court of Appeals and she had to do the rest of her time. But how is it that no consideration was given to the fact that she had been accorded provisional liberty? And how could the fact be ignored that they were dealing with a changed person who had already recognised the inhumanity and foolishness of armed struggle at the moment when it was enjoying its greatest vigour and successes? And how is it that those in power do not feel the tremendous disproportion of the sentences for those who have killed and those who haven't?