Ilaria Cucchi: “My brother Stefano would not have had a trial with Nordio’s reforms”

«Italy spends less than other European countries on justice, is twenty-second for the number of magistrates in proportion to the population and is one of the last, among those belonging to the OECD, for the slowness of civil cases. The art. 111 of the Constitution is overwhelmed by the length of criminal trials with irreparable damage to suspects and victims of crimes, continues Cucchi – the senator of the Green and Left Alliance Ilaria Cucchi said in the Chamber on Minister Nordio’s report on the administration of Justice -. And the proposed solution is to cut criminal proceedings in a linear way, introducing new wicked rules of judgment which, with the reformed articles 408 and 425 of the code of criminal procedure, give the investigating judges and the investigating judges the possibility of continuing with the proceedings only when they are reasonably convinced of the expected conviction of the suspects, while until yesterday it was sufficient that they rightly considered the celebration of the hearing to be appropriate and dutiful. In this way, the defendants sent to trial, in defiance of the Constitution, will already be considered guilty. Many important trials for very serious crimes could not have reached the truth and done justice”.

«I will give important examples – added Cucchi – such as the Aldrovandi trial and the Bergamini trial which is still being celebrated 32 years after his killing and after no less than two filings. And finally the trial that I experienced firsthand after 160 hearings and 16 degrees of judgement: the one for the killing of my brother Stefano. Well, these wicked changes would not have allowed the celebration. There will never be other cases like these because trials will not be allowed. There will be many accused sons of no one found guilty without trial and many victims without the possibility of obtaining truth and justice”.

«I am launching today – continued the senator – a real cry of pain for the havoc that we are preparing to make of the Constitution in matters of justice. Citizens perceive justice as inadequate and incapable of ensuring the maintenance of the social pact. In truth, the fault does not lie with Minister Nordio or with the majority who support him. However, the minister should avoid taking it upon himself with the reforms he has announced he intends to implement. He gives a clean break with the past, he doesn’t make himself co-responsible for this massacre. Someone said that this reform is good because it arouses so much criticism. It means that he has lived for a short time, as I have, in courtrooms. The justice system cannot be privatized by indiscriminately cutting the number of trials. The much-heralded and certainly useful decriminalization of the thousands of trivial minor crimes that engulf the courts remains a mirage. The risk is that it will be even more a trial for the rich and powerful to the detriment of ordinary citizens or, worse, the weakest. I think I interpret the plea, the cry that comes from the village below, the fragile one, the most affected by this legislative system: no to Minister Nordio’s reforms».

The sentence of the trial bis
«The significant probative unambiguousness of the facts and the lack of a plausible alternative explanation lead us to believe that Mandolini had learned of the beating at the time of closing and signing the arrest report and that, therefore, he had knowingly and intentionally failed to mention the two perpetrators of the violence against Stefano Cucchi among those involved in the arrest and to report the oppositional behavior of Cucchi at the time of identification for fingerprinting and photo identification”.

This is what we read in the reasons for the sentence in the Bis Appeal process for the accusations of forgery in the Cucchi case with which Marshal Roberto Mandolini, commander of the Appia station at the material time, was sentenced to three years and six months last July , and at two years and four months, the carabiniere Francesco Tedesco, the soldier who, with his statements, reopened the investigation into the case of Stefano Cucchi. A sentence pronounced a few hours after the prescription. For the judges, all the elements of the crime of forgery, committed by a public official to conceal another crime and ensure impunity for another crime and consisted in the omission of the attestation of facts intended to prove the truth, are present. «The crime committed by Mandolini is characterized by considerable seriousness, both with reference to the ability to commit a crime – because the immediate forgery is revealing of the ability to react, even by committing crimes, without putting hesitation or meditation in the way of the criminal action -, both for the intensity of the intentional fraud, both for the extent of the consequences of the conduct, given – we read in the motivations – that the forgery in the arrest report must be identified as the mother of the subsequent misdirections that initially misdirected the investigations into the perpetrators of the violence suffered from Stefano Cucchi to the agents of the penitentiary police».

«It must not be omitted, in the evaluation of the high seriousness of the crime and with reference to the contemporary conduct of the crime, that Mandolini, when he committed the crime, held, as interim commander of the Carabinieri Appia Station, a position of guarantee of the integrity of the inmates for the service activity, and that the duties inherent in that position have been violated – the judges underline – as well as with the conduct of forgery aimed at covering up the violence suffered by Cucchi, with the denied protection connected to the absence of timely treatment which would been lent to Stefano Cucchi if the station commander had, as was his duty, immediately activated the health checks, even if only to verify that the state of Stefano Cucchi, after the beatings, did not require further medical interventions and in such a way as to reassure the arrested person about the dutiful environmental stigmatization of the abuse committed by the public officials who had him in custody; a condition which – the judges underline – would certainly have produced the early revelation of the suffering suffered by Stefano Cucchi and, hopefully, the interruption of the causal series which led to his death ».

As for Tedesco, who did not participate in Cucchi’s beating, the judges underlined however “the seriousness of the conduct carried out by a public official who, having witnessed a particularly heinous crime, as committed by other public officials to the detriment of a citizen helpless, he violated his duty to report, providing a minor, but not minimal, contribution to the perpetration of the crime of forgery; which far from being of modest gravity, represented the origin of a series of deviant behaviors carried out in cascade, repeated over time for years, always trying to distance the investigators from the real occurrence of the facts”. «We certainly do not want to diminish the courage shown by Tedesco when he intervened immediately in favor of Cucchi and, albeit belatedly, in favor of ascertaining the truth – the judges write in reference to the role and revelations made by Tedesco following – we just want to highlight that in the present case there are different elements to consider in the measurement of the sentence, different and of opposite sign, with respect to which the synthesis implemented by the first Judge appears to be absolutely acceptable to this Court, as well as the comparative judgment – in terms of equivalence – formulated in relation to the generic extenuating circumstances already recognized to the defendant; rather, taking into account the conclusions favorable to the defendant reached in relation to one of the disputed conducts of forgery – the judges conclude – the sentence must be reduced by the measure of two months’ imprisonment”.

The Appeal bis for Mandolini and Tedesco was decided by the Cassation last April in the context of the hearing with which the 12-year prison sentence for the carabinieri Alessio Di Bernardo and Raffaele D’Alessandro accused of murder was finalized unintentional.