Italians aren’t unique…
Italy is known for its change of governments, corruption, dalliances among public officials, unions abusing public trust, and ties to organized crime. Is it any wonder the justice system is completely dysfunctional? It isn’t alone, of course. France and Spain and many Latin American “democracies” suffer equally from incompetence and corruption. I’ve written about Argentina in these pages—their President was just exonerated from killing a special prosecutor on the eve of announcing an indictment against her. Bolivia, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru have long battled the often lucrative ties between public officials and drug cartels.
The Amanda Knox case in Italy is just the tip of the iceberg. For those not paying attention, she’s the perfect example of what can happen when double jeopardy is allowed in judicial proceedings. Italy’s keystone cops and keystone courts dragged this case on for eight years. First, she was convicted. Then she was exonerated. Then they overturned the acquittal. Finally, that same Supreme Court that overturned the acquittal closed the case. I don’t have info on the ex-boyfriend, but the guy who committed the murder is already serving time. That didn’t matter. Italian prosecutors, pandering to local pressure groups and media attention like leaders of a lynch mob, went after Knox and her ex-boyfriend as willing accomplices. Never mind that they’ve been tried for the same crime several times!
Note that all the countries mentioned above are “Latin countries,” by which I mean they’re places where romance languages derived from Latin are spoken. An accident of history, you might say. Maybe something to do with the Catholic Church and the Inquisition tradition, others might say. Whatever. Just don’t blame the languages, though. Blame those old speakers of that dead language Latin, the ancient Romans, who ruled the ancient world with an iron fist and created all those wonderful Italian sites like aqueducts, orgy baths, and a Roman circus where they got their jollies by murdering Christians.
The Roman Empire, perhaps the ancient world’s worst in its despotic dominance that reached from the British Isles to the Middle East, where the standard form of punishment was crucifixion universally applied to Celts, Christians, and Jews, made the Third Reich look absolutely angelic by comparison if we factor in the difference between weapons technologies. It left more than the smoldering cinders of its language to these countries. All these countries follow Roman law, which amounts to (1) you’re guilty until proven innocent; (2) legal precedents, often used in English law, are irrelevant; (3) often even going beyond double jeopardy; and (4) laying out what citizens can NOT do (the corollary to that is that everything that isn’t prohibited is fair game).
Roman law allows for many abuses. Italy and the rest of the countries I’ve named are rife with abuses, to say the least. You might think America’s legal system is bad, but these countries should be studied by scientists specialized in chaos theory. Justice moves so slow that defendants often die in jail, waiting for their day in court. An avvocato or giudice (that’s lawyer or judge in Italy, not the green vegetable with the big seed or healthy juice made from it) appears in court in medieval robes and bloviates, so full of himself that one is tempted to stick him with a pin to see whether he explodes. Pomp and circumstance are more important than justice, a Roman tradition as old as the Seven Hills.
You might still think that O. J. killed his wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her maybe boyfriend Ron Goldman, but he was acquitted because the LA cops botched the case. No second chance for keystone cops or stupid prosecutors in America’s system—there’s no double jeopardy. The authorities get one chance to make their case, so they’d better do it right. You can argue that our system lets some guilty parties get away with crimes—in this case, a double murder—but that’s not the point. In America, you’re innocent until proven guilty, and our jury system, as arbitrary as it all seems sometimes, especially when decisions seem racially motivated (white juries convicting black men, for example, or excessive death sentences for minorities), generally forces prosecutors and cops to make a solid case—if there’s reasonable doubt, they won’t convict.
At least, that’s the way it’s supposed to work in America. It doesn’t work that way at all in countries where Roman law has been inherited. In fact, just contrast American trials with the Amanda Knox fiasco or what generally happens in Latin justice systems built on Roman law. Bottom line: you don’t want to be accused of a crime in these countries. Amanda Knox was lucky. After throwing aside the acquittal, everyone thought the Italian SC would move for extradition. While that would have been an interesting test—would the U.S. tell the Italians, “Sure, come back in two hundred years after you’ve brought your justice system out of the Middle Ages”?—the Italian SC surprised everyone. In a sense, that roller coaster ride for Amanda just shows how chaotic Italian justice is.
My experience with justice systems based on Roman law doesn’t come from my sojourn in Colombia. The closest I came there was bribing a traffic cop—he didn’t have a pen to write the ticket, so I gave him mine. Guess my generosity motivated him to forget about the ticket! I had a worse experience in Paris. With tours into the countryside versus stumbling around that beautiful city, I can only say Parisians are rude and belligerent in comparison to the simple and welcoming folk in the countryside. The cops in a Paris police station were no exception to this rule. We went there after pickpockets expertly lifted my wallet—silly me, trying to help someone having an epileptic fit (it was fake, of course). As usual, the cops blamed the tourists and just wrote it off as a daily occurrence. Fortunately my French was good enough to get through all the bureaucratic forms so that we could cancel my credit cards. I just knew my assailant would never see a French courtroom.
Stuff like that can happen in any big city—New York City, for example. I bring it up only because it shows another characteristic of Roman justice in the countries I’ve mentioned: the victim is often blamed. We sometimes do that with victims in cases of rape, spousal abuse, and prostitution—maybe too often—but our justice system is clogged precisely because we mostly go after all the perps. (People who complain about overcrowded jails should go live in Rome.) Some cases are never closed; there are many “cold cases.” But those Paris cops wouldn’t and won’t ever try—they’re too busy mocking the tourists, for one thing. I don’t blame them completely. They’re just part of that Roman law heritage. Keep that in mind when you visit these countries. They might come to their senses in a few hundred years. I’m not hopeful.
And so it goes….
