... judges is intensely politicized, with formal party-like political groupings. The great political change of the early 1990s was engineered by magistrates.

(By the great law of unintended consequences, what these Left magistrates actually created was Berlusconi II.) And now, when the parliament has tried to take a crucial step toward the citizens’ rights that prevail elsewhere in the West, a change long advocated by Gaetano Pecorella, the distinguished voice of Italy’s trial lawyers, it has been frustrated by the Berlusconi virus, the virus that makes any judicial reform that might also help Berlusconi and his pals appear fatally diseased.
So President Ciampi is sending back to the parliament a law that would limit the ability of magistrates to appeal acquittals. Perhaps he is justified: the law, quickly written, may be badly written, may need some patching and polishing. But that is not how his action is understood today. It is seen as support for the view, absurd, but just re-stated by Eugenio Scalfari, that the law would unbalance the current “parity” between the two sides in a courtroom—parity because both have the power to appeal judgments. This, cari amici, is a hoax.
Is it parity when one side has, and uses vigorously, the power to imprison, for reasons defined by rules that are regularly stretched or ignored, for long periods that are, in practice, infinitely renewable? This detention, sometimes substituting, in the minds of a magistrate, for punishment that the courts are unlikely to levy, has been used heavily over the last 15 years to force victims to talk. The “novel” by Dr. Dina Nerozzi, mentioned here last week, is a thinly-disguised precise account of her husband’s nine years of harassment and incarceration, ruinous, of course, to family, profession, and health. He was never convicted of any crime.
Is it parity when, on one side, the whole muscle of the Palace of Justice, with armies of full-time magistrates who must by law open a dossier on every case, have, in fact, perfect freedom to pursue cases selectively, and when these same magistrates will eventually bring their case before a judge who is a colleague from the same brotherhood of magistrates, a member of the same culture with an office just down the hall? On the other side of these intimidating powers of investigation, detention, and influence stands a citizen who has none of this, represented by an attorney, the best he can afford, an attorney who is an outsider to the brotherhood of magistrates, little likely to be on a first- name basis with the judge, and facing a jungle of procedures, many of them left over from the Fascist era, that egregiously favor the prosecution and, even more than that, favor what mattered most to Fascist-era magistrates and their successors, the investigatory phase.
Then, one adds to all this the chilling fact that a finding in favor of the defendant does not allow him to walk out of the court and resume his life—because the prosecutors have many levels and venues of appeal available to them to resume the horror just at the moment when the victim seeks to begin breathing fresh air again. A Giulio Andreotti may have the will and resources to keep fighting year after year, but most citizens do not.
This is such a serious breach in any country’s protection of civil rights, that constitutional and/or legal safeguards against double jeopardy were recognized as fundamental in the 18th century. Some modern states have found formulas that are merely limiting, with time limits, requirements of new charges (i.e., alleged violation of a different law from the one originally used in a trial) or, at least, significant new evidence (a simple change of venue is never, except in Italy, enough). But nowhere else, in any country you would want to inhabit, is one’s jeopardy so crushingly multiple.
But, since Berlusconi wants it, it must be vile. And since both parties are currently able to appeal, this is called equality. And czar and serf are equal; both are four-letter words.