The Verdict of History: The Great Trials. from Ancient Times to Our Days.

By Virginia Lalli

An injustice to one is a threat made to all (Montesquieu).

This book seeks to document and analyse the great legal trials of history, from ancient times to our days. The protagonists include Socrates, Catiline, Sacco and Vanzetti, and Oscar Wilde.
The careful reader will naturally wonder, how fair were these trials?
This book narrates the trials and provides an original historical account of the evolution of human civilization from a range of perspectives.
Indeed, the author posits that from the various charges, exchanges between prosecution and defence and intentions expressed in the cases. The great existential values of humanity are revealed.
Our protagonists embodied ideals that remain current to this day. Each one of them has left us a specific message to reflect upon.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Mar 24, 2016
• ISBN: 9781504986779

Virginia Lalli

Virginia Lalli is an attorney called to the Bar of Rome. She has spoken at several conferences on the subject of nascent life and maternity support. Virginia Lalli is the author of “Aborto, perché no? Risposte pro-life ad argomentazioni pro-choice” (IF Press, 2013) and “Women in Law” (AuthorHouse, 2014). She is currently studying toward a PhD in human rights at the University of Rome, La Sapienza and leads a research group on bioethics at the Senate of the Italian Republic.

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© 2016 Virginia Lalli. All rights reserved.

Translation of Sara Pasetto

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse  05/09/2016

ISBN: 978-1-5049-8678-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5049-8679-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5049-8677-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016904754

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Contents

Preface

Demosthenes and The Distracted Judges

1: The Trial of Socrates

2: The Conspiracy of Catiline

3: The Trial of Galileo Galilei

4: The Trial Of Oscar Wilde

5: The Trial of Nicola Sacco (1891-1927) and Bartolomeo Vanzetti (1888-1927)

6: The Nuremberg Trials

About the Author

About the Translator

"To find justice, one must be faithful to it; like all divinities, it only appears to those who believe."

Piero Calamandrei

"Elogio dei giudici scritto da un avvocato".

An ode to judges written by a lawyer

"Ius est ars boni et aequi."

Ulpian, recalling Celsus’s definition.

To my parents

Preface

A juxtaposition of the terms trial and history is an ordinary matter for anyone who engages with the law; it is also normal for anyone who is interested in legal facts, whether from reading the news, from personal experience or from perusing the pages written by famous authors throughout the centuries.

In etymological terms, the judicial process itself derives from the past tense and from the past participle of the Latin verb procedere: it indicates the re-presentation of a path that has already been completed and that is inevitably already history, since it is addressed again before a court. Indeed, when a trial takes place, a set of human actions are recalled and submitted for evaluation to a figure who will have to hold them – or their outcome – to a standard of legality, to clear or punish those who performed those actions. This standard of legality, albeit placing a claim to eternity, is highly mutable in time and place, such that it is often nothing more than a pretext for something other than legality.

Before the judge, therefore, the parties offer different interpretations of a set of previously occurred facts, to which a behavioural rule that is currently in force must be applied, a rule that will act as a filter of the history recounted in court, to enable the judgment to be handed down. This judgment will sanction an absolute and unchallengeable truth (as per the concept of res judicata, i.e. the impossibility to modify what was finally declared in a judgment) in terms of innocence or guilt.

Thus, each trial – no matter how minor and obscure – is inevitably a phenomenon through which the past, a story, are evaluated: therefore, intentions to act or mere ideas should never be put on trial; this is a rule of Civilization that should always be kept in mind by those who are involved in a trial. Actually, history is replete with trials conducted in relation to previous facts not to identify the wrongdoing therein, but to prevent someone from acting, feeling or thinking for the future in some way, even if fully aware that historical facts are not juridically reprehensible, and that the harm perhaps consisted precisely in the action of the institution of power, which held the trial.

Indeed, readers should always bear in mind that a trial is held between parties such that a judgment is handed down by a judge, upon consultation with attorneys, within a system of rules that constitutes the standard procedural code. To hold; to hand down judgment; to advocate for or summon; to judge, or make justice by issuing a judgment; to follow a procedure: it is difficult to fail to see how trials, how every trial, in recalling History (whether with a capital or a lowercase H), invoke a ritual with a sacred character. Indeed, it could not be otherwise. Suffice it to consider that the main function of law – applied precisely in the context of the trial – is to achieve that ne cives ad arma ruant, as written in the Roman Law of the XII Tables. This law was both juridical and sacred, and regulated and enabled peace among the cives. In other words, the main function of the trial is to make tangible a law that prevents citizens from resorting to arms. But why should citizens even resort to arms? This would happen if, without observing a Law that regulates private and public human relations, citizens sought to make the particular (as Machiavelli would call it) prevail over other private parties or over the Republic itself.

Thus arises the eternal dilemma: the trial leads to a truth, which once ritually ascertained and ruled upon, becomes absolute and intangible. However, can procedural rules constrain the reality of the facts? Could not the procedural limitation of admissible evidence, the very interaction between the parties in court denature the historical and natural Truth, in favour of a political truth, a truth of power, which is instructive and exemplary and has nothing to do with the truth of Justice that all citizens in all place and time seek, in the pursuit of which rivers of ink have been spilt, and, since ancient times, innumerable clay tablets and sacred steles have been engraved?

Precisely herein lies the risk inherent in every trial: the risk that its holding denature the straightforward recalling of historical facts and deeds, leading to a judgment that fully traces the Latin maxim summum jus, summa injuria: extreme justice is extreme injustice.

This book presents a number of exemplary trials that have taken place in history. These trials show that often the Law has served as a façade for the need to protect the collectivity, decorum, order, Peace, humanity itself; a need which was often no more than a modest cloak for the injustice or the revenge sought by a successful party, once part of a historical, political, ethical event, and judge of those same facts of which he had been – previously or simultaneously – the direct or indirect counterpart! This is true of Socrates, as well as of Catiline; Sacco and Vanzetti, and the German Nazi leaders; Wilde and Galileo.

Despite the immobility of res judicata, History emerges. History, decided upon by Judges in all ages and places, has its revenge, judging trials herself and enabling – as a genuine magistra vitae – the handing down, through the centuries, of new judgments through which the absolved individual becomes the guilty party, the accuser becomes the accused, and the party declared guilty is absolved. This quasi-cathartic process is perhaps what enables those most ferocious of beasts – human beings – to moderate its adjudicatory action, and to avoid extreme injustice from always being the foundation of the law established in judgments.

Reading Virginia Lalli’s beautifully written pages on the trials of history, presented as dusty volumes from the archives of the Courtroom of Time exhumed for an evaluation that might, sometimes, become a revision, will enable readers to reflect on the contemporary acuity and fallacy of judicial proceedings of the past, identifying many analogies with contemporary Historical facts and legal current events. Also, it enables practitioners to examine, with ever greater rigour, the real essence and purposes of the sacred rite that is the trial, in which the factual account must always be followed by multiple and continuous revisions to reach judgments that respect Jus and Jura, Law and Justice. All this takes place before History takes on the task of revision, a History that cannot be stopped by means of laws and trials but can be more unpredictable and implacable than any trial, even though it may no longer apply to the living, to whom alone trials are addressed!

Rome, 2 May 2015

Avvocato Juan Carlos Gentile

Demosthenes and The Distracted Judges

from the Noctes Atticae, Aulus Gellius (Rome AD 130 - Rome AD 180).

One day, the famous orator Demosthenes was discussing a case that could involve the death penalty. When he noticed that the judges were not paying attention, he said Listen to me just for a while. I am about to tell you a new and cheerful story.

The judges thus prepared to listen to him. Demosthenes began: "One day, a young man hired a donkey to travel comfortably from Athens to Megara. In the middle of his journey, the midday heat became unbearable and neither trees nor shelters offered shade. The young man stopped the donkey, unmounted, and sat on his saddle so that he could take shade under the animal.

The donkey owner became irate, claiming that the rental of the donkey did not include the rental of its shadow. The young man retorted that the shadow could not be separated from the donkey and thus, the shadow had to be included.

The two men began to fight and punch each other. At the end, they agreed on a decision that conformed to law.

As soon as Demosthenes saw that he had the judges’ full attention, he suddenly came down from the platform. The judges called to him and beseeched him to finish the story. He said: What? You can listen to a story on a donkey’s shadow, and you cannot listen to the case of a man whose life is at stake?

1

The Trial of Socrates

I say again that the greatest good of man is daily to converse about virtue, and all that concerning which you hear me examining myself and others, and […] the life which is unexamined is not worth living.

Apology by Plato¹

Plato’s Apology was written as a direct testimony of Socrates’ trial for impiety.

This trial took place on a morning in May 399 BCE, at the Heliaia, the court of Athens.

Three accusations were made against Socrates (Athens 469 BCE - Athens 399 BCE) before the Heliaia: impiety, corruption of youth, and introduction of