Giovanni Pellegrino, the heretic of the left

“Political power was to be surrounded by a crown of neutral powers of control, to which it was however necessary to attribute a pluralist and equiordinate character, excluding the supremacy of the ordinary criminal judge, for prevent a government of judges from determining a substantially technocratic evolution of the legal system”. It is in this thought, which matured during the years of the Mani Pulite tsunami, while the judicial revolution was praised in many quarters, that we can trace one of the main heretical traits that characterized the political path of John Pellegrinowhich he himself told in book “Ten Years of Solitude. Memoirs of a leftist heretic” (published by Rubbettino). In the Senate from 1987 to 2001, first for the PCI and then for the PDS, Pellegrino covered the important roles of Chairman of the Immunity Board (just at the time when the Mani Pulite pool was inundating Parliament with requests for authorization to proceed) and of the bicameral commission of inquiry into terrorism and massacres.