Justice... sort of

[fpb]

An Italian appeals court awarded former actress Laura Antonelli (whom I mentioned elsewhere in this blog) the enormous sum of 108,000 euros in compensation for ten years of criminal and civil proceedings which had turned out to be vexatious and ill-grounded. In 1992, the police found some 50 grams of cocaine in the actress' villa by the sea, and charged her with dealing. Laura Antonelli never denied that she had been using the drug, but she rejected from the beginning the charge of dealing, and spent the next ten years trying to prove her innocence. In the meanwhile, she quite literally went insane - at the height of the struggle against the justice system, she was said to suffer from delusions and "mystical ideations". It was the testimony of a psychiatrist, who testified under oath that her mental collapse was due largely or wholly to the pressure of the agonizingly ongoing litigation, that eventually won her the huge award - which sounds big, but is not when you bear in mind the infamy of a conviction for dealing, ten years of agonized struggle, and the mental agony of being taken for a criminal. Miss Antonelli's life was blasted by this charge; apart from her mental breakdown, she has spent the last ten years alone and has not acted since the trial began.

Unjust charges and long trials are a curse of the law, especially in Italy. And while one does not like to see another opportunity offered for litigation, on the other hand I would say that it should become a constant practise to punish the State for vexatious or false charges and incompetently mounted, overlong trials - and not only when the victim has the resources and the determination (one has the impression that Miss Antonelli clung to her litigation like a drowning woman to an oar) to waste a huge slice of her life just trying to get "a little harle of justice".

Comments

[ravenclaw-eric.livejournal.com]

Being a China maven, I like the way this was dealt with in the traditional Chinese codes. Magistrates had very broad powers, up to and including torture, to compel the confession without which nobody could be convicted---but a magistrate who misused those powers (either a person was found to have been wrongly convicted, or died under questioning without a confession) got exactly what he had given out. And the same went for his assistants, who had done the actual grunt-work. No "I was only following orders" could save them.

As I'm sure you can imagine, this made magistrates ve-ry careful.