[LST] The question of Italy’s criminal justice system

http://blog.tehelka.com/the-question-of-italys-criminal-justice-system/



The question of Italy's criminal justice system

Italy's Deputy Foreign Minister Staffan de Mistura (L) and Italian Ambassador to India Daniele Mancini address a press conference on the issue of Italian marines in New Delhi. PTI Photo
Over the past year or so, a little diplomatic drama has been playing itself out between Italy and India in connection with the arrest, incarceration and trial of two Italian marines accused of shooting to death two Indian fishermen off the coast of Kerala. It hasn't helped that the two accused men were riding shotgun on a ship that is accused of having illegally been in Indian waters.

Various spokespersons – official and otherwise – for the two Italian gunslingers have defended them vigorously. Three lines of argument have been prominent. First, the shooting was in self-defence or to protect the ship, which was threatened by various manoeuvres executed by the trawler carrying the two fishermen. Two, the Italian ship was never in Indian waters and the incident, such as it was, was enacted in international waters; and arising partially from the above, whatever the merits of the case, Indian courts have no jurisdictional authority to try the accused, meaning that they should forthwith be handed over to Italian authorities so that any trial that is deemed to be required must be carried out by them.

The waters, just to recapitulate, have been further muddied by Rome's entirely undiplomatic reluctance to send the undertrial marines back to India after they were granted parole to visit their homeland for various reasons and by their attempt to impose unreasonable preconditions on New Delhi in return for giving them over for trial. The fact that they have indeed been sent back has triggered outrage and unsavoury rhetoric in the media and political class, so much so that the Italian foreign minister has had to quit his job. It goes without saying that Italy's actions and rhetoric has not been in accordance with accepted (and acceptable) diplomatic protocols. We shall return to this argument in a bit, but to make the point a little more forcefully we need to make a small detour.

A few days ago, a top Italian court ordered a retrial into what has come to be known ironically as the Amanda Knox case. Briefly, a British exchange student, Meredith Kercher, was murdered in Perugia, Italy in 2007. A man from the Ivory Coast was eventually convicted for the murder on the basis of conclusive DNA evidence. But even before his arrest, Amanda Knox, an American exchange student who shared a house with Kercher and her one week-old Italian boyfriend, Rafaelle Sollecito, had been detained for the murder. Knox spent four years in an Italian jail, while prosecutors tried their best to establish that Knox had persuaded Rudy Hermann Guede, the Ivorian, to commit the murder. Knox and Sollecito were eventually cleared of any involvement in the murder in 2011.

The point of interest in this case is that Knox (and Sollecito) were relentlessly pursued for the murder despite the fact that there was very little evidence that they were conspirators, even after Guede had been found guilty and sentenced to 30 years in jail. Guede's jail term was reduced to 16 years on first appeal and much of the case against the two students rested on his accusations. Several points have become clear since Knox and Sollecito's acquittal.

First, the way the Italian – or Perugian – police treated the suspects Knox and Sollecito bordered on the barbaric. At any rate, they defied any civilized precept of police practice and constituted serious abuse of the human rights of the suspects. Second, the shambolic operation of the Italian criminal justice system meant that an innocent young person had to undergo around four years of incarceration because she was denied bail on the basis of the supposition that she was a flight risk. The Italian criminal justice system and law-enforcement agencies were lucky that they didn't have the stuffing sued out of them. Third, there is reasonable ground for the supposition that the prosecution struck a deal with Guede to bolster its maniacal pursuit of an innocent young woman. The only positive aspect to the entire business is the strong likelihood that the US will not extradite Knox, whatever rigged verdict the retrial throws up.

It is not clear what triggered this fanatical pursuit. Feminist readings have however, suggested that the deeply patriarchal and conservative attitudes historically ingrained in Perugian society made it natural that an attractive young woman, with her more relaxed sexuality would be considered a threat by the typical Perugian male and thereby constructed as predatory, dangerous, 'diabolical' and a natural target for witch hunting, historically a time-honoured occupation in Perugia. Knox was thus easily constructed as the villain of the piece, manipulating naïve men to do her bidding to consummate her inordinate sexual desires and allow her to triumph in her competition with Kircher for male sexual attention.

To return to our original story, this is the system that is now boiling over with outrage at the detention and trial of the two marines, who have as we have seen, admitted to killing the two fishermen. The only point that is in dispute is the circumstance of the murder – and surely it is not unreasonable for New Delhi to demand their trial so that a legally constituted court can reach a determination about it. We must also remember that in glaring contradistinction to the treatment meted out to Knox, also a non-citizen, and Sollecito, New Delhi's treatment of the two marines has been utterly humane, perhaps excessively so. They have been detained under house arrest rather than incarcerated in a prison and were allowed to travel to Italy to observe the Christmas festivities, a leniency that was grievously abused by the Italian authorities.

I do not wish to make nationalistic points because I am not particularly nationalistic by ideological persuasion. A point needs to be made, however. There does not seem to be any reason to treat the sensibilities of a third-rate power with a crumbling economy, stubbornly racist attitudes and a political establishment that is deeply imbued with extremely right-wing predilections that sometimes seem to hark back to the days of Mussolini with kid gloves. And this is a point about Italy, not India. No one is arguing that India is some kind of democratic idyll, entitled to take a moral high ground inscribed into the core of a civilizing project. The point is more about Italy and the need to expose its hypocritical double standards and its ultra-nationalistic pretensions. If the marines had been guilty of shooting dead fishermen in Bangladeshi or Pakistani waters, the point would have been no different.

Italian commentators have argued that the Italian criminal justice system should not be derided because Italy is one of the few countries in which a number of prominent political leaders have been successfully prosecuted and keeping in view the fact that one of the earliest initiatives to pursue mobsters and crack down on organized crime happened in Italy with the pursuit of mafia leaders. There is no reason to decry these very substantial achievements, but they cannot justify the delinquencies of the Italian structures of criminal justice and law enforcement
--
"To those who believe in resistance, who live between hope and impatience and have learned the perils of being unreasonable. To those who understand enough
to be afraid and yet retain their fury."


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