In the trial opened against the State Attorney General everything turned out to be atypical. We are talking, of course, about each of the actors who accused him, about the doubts raised by a more than controversial instruction or about the resolution before the opening of the oral hearing that incorporated a dissenting vote that denied the case any basis. Nor can we ignore that episode of the trial in which the Speaker of the Chamber interpreted as a threat the moral dilemma presented by a journalist trapped in the obligation to protect his source. The way in which the conviction was made public along with the numerical majority supporting the declaration also reached the unprecedented level. Nothing has yet been said about the motivation that allows the defendant’s guilt to be demonstrated in law.
The doubts raised by this last way of proceeding are many and raise some questions on which it is legitimate to reflect in order to deduce the way in which the Supreme Court was able to take a position. I’ll just mention a few questions here. For how long and what did the Chamber decide? Did the Court limit itself to verifying the existence of a majority capable of pronouncing the sentence? Was there really room to discuss in depth the presentation first assigned to the judge who apparently asked for the acquittal? If not, was the option of acquittal never discussed? In what argumentative terms was the second statement discussed which will form the basis of the conviction? Were the ruling and the majority that supported it made public to prevent the passage of days from causing a shift in votes between the blocs? The questions are not pure rhetoric. And the order of factors here can alter, even theoretically, the product.
Since the Supreme Court ruling became known, analyzes have continued trying to imagine the arguments for a jurisdictional action whose real scope and motivations we still do not know; something abnormal in a state of law. I will not go into the impotence that what happened causes in those who have been convicted and whose defense will be able to articulate itself on appeal. But the crux of the matter is connected, if possible, to something more relevant. And the foundation of the legitimacy of the judiciary in a democracy lies solely in the motivation of its pronouncements. In the case of collegial bodies, as in the present case, the formation of the will of the judging body must also be the theoretical result of an effective deliberation. A deliberation that must offer real conditions so that the best quality legal arguments prevail over the majority. Imposing the logic of a majority that protects a sentence from the start and making it public by postponing the motivation for the sentence until the publication of the sentence means validating an inappropriate way of proceeding for a criminal judge. Doing so without hiding it also contributes to rapidly increasing mistrust about the ultimate meaning of the process.
