Gasparri: “The Public Prosecutor’s Office is evaluating whether authorization is required for La Russa’s mobile phone.” But the cell phone was in exclusive use by his son Leonardo

“The Public Prosecutor’s Office must take care not to go against the Constitution: it must move in the wake of the laws and therefore evaluate whether to ask for an authorization or not”, the vice president of the Senate Maurizio Gasparri tells AdnKronos, referring to the seizure of Leonardo’s cell phone La Russa, son of the president of Palazzo Madama, under investigation for sexual assault in Milan.

The Forza Italia exponent warns: “There are a number of prerogatives that exist and that must be respected, such as the inviolability of correspondence. I often use Whatsapp to talk to ministers, commission presidents, parliamentary offices, news agencies. The theme is: what is correspondence? The concept of correspondence and inviolability extends. Therefore, the Public Prosecutor’s Office is right to move if it moves with circumspection “. To then add: “If there is an exchange between La Russa’s son and his friends, it’s one thing. But what would happen if the Public Prosecutor’s Office were to come across, for example, an exchange between the President of the Senate and the President of the Republic?”.

In reality, the Prosecutor of Milan, with the prosecutor Rosaria Stagnaro and the deputy Letizia Mannella, in the decree ordering the seizure of the cell phone of La Russa jr (delivered by the 21-year-old to the police station) has already set the limits and also the analysis of the device will have to follow very specific trajectories, the result of the laws, the Constitution, the pronouncements of the Cassation.

The first stake is now clear. In the hands of the investigators there is only the mobile phone – without the SIM card, registered in the name of the father’s law firm – of Leonardo La Russa. The prosecution took this path because the device, as specified in the seizure decree, is in the “exclusive use” of the young person. If the prosecutors also wanted to analyze the SIM, it is probable that a request to the Senate will be needed precisely because the card is somehow connected to Ignazio La Russa, a member of the Milanese law firm that bears his name. Whether or not to send this request to the council for the authorizations of Palazzo Madama is still the subject of further investigation.

In any case, already in the decree that confiscates (only) the cell phone, the prosecutors have clarified that conversations between the suspect and subjects covered by constitutional guarantees, starting with parliamentary immunity, must be excluded from the searches. For example, a chat between Leonardo and his father cannot end up in the records of the investigation. Nor, to quote Gasparri, a conversation between the second office of state and the President of the Republic.

In view of the forensic copy of the contents of the device, the investigators will have to identify the “keywords” to dig into the vast sea of ​​information kept inside. And it is not in theory excluded that, from the analysis of the device, dialogues and information may emerge which could also exonerate the suspect.

It’s not just a matter of investigative interest. Also on this delicate phase – which in some cases can be carried out in contradiction with the defendant’s defense – one must move in the wake of the jurisprudence. A sentence of the Court of Cassation of 2020, defined by sector experts as a sort of “vademecum” of IT probative acquisitions, sets several stakes as well as a warning against “omnibus” seizures. The digital copies of the IT tools are above all “timed”, given that they must be retained for the time necessary to extrapolate the data, and then they must be returned to the suspect. And the data must be closely related to the subject of the investigation and the fact-finding.