“The Court of Cassation decided [the crime] could not have been later than November 1999—crucially, three months earlier than maintained by the prosecution in the lower court.” That’s right. But you should also notice the little detail that such shifting back of the crucial date was not an original idea of the Court, neither a demand by Mill’s defense. It was suggested by the public prosecutor, who thus reversed the prosecution’s policy in the lower courts.

Why did the Cassation prosecutor choose to give up a proper conviction? It is only fair to assume that he did not trust very much his own evidence, which the lower judges had only accepted so to speak provisionally, in the full knowledge that the last word was not theirs. On the other hand, as you notice, the final sentence, though not a conviction, is still damaging for both Mr. Mills and Mr. Berlusconi.

So, this all looks like a classic Italian compromise. The sentence was not evidence-driven. Rather, it was led by political considerations: the desire to inflict to Mr. Berlusconi some political cost, but without incurring in a full-fledged miscarriage of justice that might induce Parliament to legislate forcefully against political justice. Yet, political justice it still is. Whatever one’s view on Mr. Berlusconi, it might perhaps be agreed that such is not the way in which justice should be run in a free society.

That's right,Ferretti.But i still am waiting the nice day when the magistrates will be denied from starting an enquiry,and this right shifted to Police and Carabinieri.All the mess that is hitting Italy starts from the right of the Bolsheviks invading our Judicial System of accusing anyone they dislike.The Government promised a reform on this ground,but nothing yet happens.

It might be nice to add that the RAI1 (flagship of the state owned television system) news section opened with: "Mills acquitted".

Who cares about truth when you own the media?

@CarrKnight:

Mr. Mills acquitted? Well, that is what the sentence actually says. Do we have to surmise from your post that you are the proud owner of some important TV ? Congratulations.

@Black Hawk:
Only in Italy does the Statute of Limitations "erase" the crime, leading to an "acquittal".
Mr. Berlusconi's lawyers are too excellent at exploiting the loopholes in Italian laws, having written quite a few themselves as parliamentarians and ministers.

@JoeSolaris:

"Only in Italy does the Statute of Limitations "erase" the crime, leading to an "acquittal"."

With all due respect, I believe this statement of yours is not true. Could indeed you substantiate it?
Thank you

The Romans had one set of laws for the rich and another for the poor, at least towards the end as the empire became more debased: looks like the wheel is going full circle.

One year ago Mills was condemn to over 4 yeas of jail and no TV news cared for it as it was a sensitive case involving the Prime minister. Now, that the trial for Mills "expired", they are all talking of this. I heard members of the government stating that Cassation decision shows that no crime was committed. Where that idea comes from? The trial expired it's not that the crime was not committed. This is Italy and the todays decision is a spit in the face of honest people that can't make crimes and hire expensive lawyers to stretch trials up to their expiration. There are elections in a month and this is part of the race to show that politicians are cleaner than what they in fact are. Look at the recent corruption cases coming up these days if you want to see the other steps of the race to make up and clean up the government face. If they really mean to fight corruption they have to impeach more than a hundred parliament members that have been sentenced or still have trials pending. of course this won't happened as it's just a show to make people full once again. I am sorry for that.

... of course I meant "people fool", not full. I apologize for the typo.

Looks like Berlusconi didn't appreciate the 'compromise'.. Commenting on the judges who didn't fully "acquit" Mills, today in Turin he stated "We are in the hands of a band of talibans".

www.theitalianist.wordpress.com

@stefano de santis (and most Berlusconi voters): until you believe that Italian judges are "Bolsheviks" just because they are critical of the government (which is not only their constitutional right but also one pf the pillars of the Italian and many other judicial systems, at least in modern Western democracies) you will never be able to understand why the rest of Europe looks at Italy with such an astonishment.
Calling judges "Bolsheviks", seeing "conspiracies" everywhere, dictating an un-free press and television (with some laudable exceptions, but as always, they confirm the rule) is, unfortunately, a clear sign of paranoia. The question is, what is behind the paranoia. "Qui bono" all this? Well, perhaps you remember the film "Wag the Dog". In it, an American president creates a fake war in order to distract the country from seeing what really happened in the White House. Which is what Mr Berlusconi has been doing not only in the past three years, but in my opinion, for all his life. Only that now he is really dangerous. Because many many Italians are SO used to all this that they start to think it's "normal". Thus, the "Bolsheviks".

@DvdB:
In my view, you have one sound point. Stefano de santis and many others in Italy are spoiling a good argument with groundless paranoid remarks about “Bolsheviks”.

In my experience, most Italian prosecutors don’t even exactly know what “Bolshevik” means. They are just very powerful persons, who can put you into “preventive” jail or spoil your reputation without really having to answer for it to anybody. Moreover, the more energetic Italian prosecutors can go on in their career to be chief judges, in effect becoming the bosses of the trial judges they are dealing with as prosecutors — which gives them added and unchecked leverage to influence sentencing.

Human nature being what it is, this enormous arbitrary power has corrupted the most ambitious among them, to the point that a number of aggressive prosecutors have ruthlessly used their position as a springboard to gain personal political power (and wealth) outside their profession. That they have mostly done so by judicial attacks against Mr. Berlusconi is very largely coincidental, and is due to the fact that the systematic use of political justice was pioneered long ago in Italy by a handful of Communist prosecutors in Milan, whose political project was then unexpectedly shot down by Mr. Berlusconi’s descent into politics. But since then things have changed. Today, people as Mr. Di Pietro and the like cannot even be properly considered as left-wingers. They are just semi-illiterate populists with no articulated ideology and whose basic instincts are those of the rogue cop. They are leaning on the former Communists for purely tactical reasons, each seeing their uneasy alliance as the only way to gain power.

Thus the rather serious problem of political justice in Italy today is not one of political ideology, much less of a Communist one. It is a matter of (mostly petty) social predators going unchecked, much like the various Mafias, and for rather similar reasons. The technical solution is making prosecutors strictly accountable for what they do. That means putting an end to the fiction that their job is the same as that of trial judges, and introducing some form of effective parliamentary control on them, just like any other executive officer.

Yet these simple reforms — like those required against the Mafias — meet with a very strong resistance within the largely pre-industrial social culture still prevailing in Italy. Arbitrary power has a lot of fans in this country, provided it is granted to one’s friends and protectors, while ideological banners are still used to distinguish friend from foe in this kind of contest. Thus, making of political justice a matter of left versus right political ideology appears a sure way to leave things as they stand, as the rest of DvdB’s rather blind comment seems to show.

Mr. Ferretti comments are bringing up, in ny opinion, two important aspects of italian citizens profile. One is that for most of them their political background is coming up in their analysis of facts concerning people of different political area . This means that if the truth on a fact is white ( like the light ) they consider and bring to evidencs only some of the colours camposing the white. They are not mentioning anything wrong; they just do not mention all the colours needed to achieve the white.
The second aspect is that , generally speacking, in Italy he who has the power very often cannot resist the temptetion to use it to become more powerfull or to help friends or to gain credits from other important people or to gain popularity. This , my little experience says, is happening in our society horizontally and vertically. One popular way of thinking says that he who blame strongly the abuse of power of others is , very often , one that , having no power cannot do the same thing himself.

Very good comment Ferretti!

@Pierone: "Looks like Berlusconi didn't appreciate the 'compromise'.."

You are perfectly right, of course. In fact, the "compromise" I mentioned was not between the prosecutors and Mr. Berlusconi. Rather, it was between the two wings of Mr. Berlusconi's opponents: those who campaign for all-out judicial attacks, cost what may, and those who instead fear the implications of a total war between constitutional powers, with the judiciary pitched against the executive and the majority of Parliament. The main representative of this more moderate school of thought is at present Italy's President of the Republic, himself a former Communist. I would not be surprised if it were to emerge that the "solution" adopted for the Mills case was indeed suggested by him.

As far as Mr. Berlusconi is concerned, he would have good reasons to welcome this "solution" only if he thought he was actually guilty. Which, apparently, is not the case.

Berlusconi and the cultishly loyal supporters often cite the 'political use of justice' as the reason for the Italian Prime Minister being so often on trial or investigated.

Beyond their capacity of reasoning, it seems, is the entirely feasible premise that Berlusconi is using a 'political use of criminality' - entering politics, using the legislature to change laws, escaping santion as a direct result.

Only suprising element is the opposition political parties, with the most notable exception Antonio Di Pietro's IdV, appear to actively avoid campaigning on pointing out such anomalies that translate in an abuse of political power.

Berlusconi, in cahoots with those 'once upon a time' anti-corruption parties Lega Nord and Alleanza Nazionale, has done nothing to control waste and corruption in Italy.

After it has been alleged that there was huge corruption in preparing the summer 2009 G8 involving the Italian Civil Protection Agency, one can only imagine how the ususal suspects (greedy over powering bureaucrats or clandestine organised crime syndicates) can fill their brimming pockets preparing the 2015 Expo in Bribesville/Tangentopoli itself, Milan.

@Ravello:
Reuters (on January 30, 2010) and other international media have quoted Mr. Berlusconi as saying that over the past 15 years he has been saddled with 109 trials and 200 million euros (175.7 million pounds) in legal fees. Since nobody appears to have corrected him, such figures can be taken as at least roughly correct. On the other hand, it is a well known fact that all these trials have not led to one single definitive conviction, although it is of course true that in a number of cases (though by no means all) Mr. Berlusconi has been acquitted thanks to the civil law equivalent of the Statute of Limitations.

So the basic and extraordinary truth is that so far his accusers have mounted against him more than one hundred cases — an uncommon fact in itself against a single defendant — and yet have been unable to prove even a single one of their many allegations against him: all such allegations have been shown to be either untrue or impossible to prove within the (quite generous) time allotted by Italy’s law to bring prosecutions to a conclusion. How can that be?

Some people seem to believe that Mr. Berlusconi, though systematically guilty, has some unexplained and unique power to escape convictions, unlike most other crooks (including powerful Mafia chiefs) who, once brought to trial, tend to regularly get their due sentences from Italian Courts. Yet, even if one forgets the accusations directly thrown out as groundless, the sheer number of aborted cases against him makes such a theory rather hard to swallow.

If it was just a matter of legal loopholes, most defendants could exploit them, and by now — after 15 years! — some jurist would have found the technical way to stop the gap. Yet no one appears to be even discussing that, so apparently the problem has nothing to do with Italian trial law (contrary to what once The Economist liked to suggest). Then what? Should we think that Mr. Berlusconi is just a very lucky fellow? But what is the probability of that, out of a run of more than 100 trials? Then again, nobody in his right mind could possibly think that Mr. Berlusconi has the Italian judiciary in his pocket, or that the Italian prosecutors failed against him due to lack of effort.

So, as usual, the simpler explanation must be the right one. As more than 100 unsuccessful trials over 15 years quite plainly suggest, Mr. Berlusconi is being the object of a very dogged judicial persecution. He has survived it not only because he was actually not guilty, but mainly thanks to his ability to afford the millions required by such a prolonged legal fight against groundless allegations. As his judiciary enemies know very well from their own professional experience, any innocent man with shallower pockets would have had to raise the white flag quite some time ago.

@Black Hawk
reading that you believe that Berlusconi had to face 109 trials, please can you complete this wikipedia voice with the missing 82?

http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedimenti_giudiziari_a_carico_di_Silvio_...

thanks for collaborating.

@DVDB.The "magistrates"i am talking about are militants of the PD ex Communist,and the party of IDV,a typical Bolshewik band.In the mental hospital of ex SOVIET UNION people was cared about paranoia in the Deviationist ant the Trotskist version.You do not mention which one affects me,but you reason like a Soviet psychiatrist.

@sgxxx:

Thank you for your remark. I have already given you my source. The Italian Wikipedia page you quote has an earlier date, and — as far as I have been able to see — does not contain a figure for the total number of trials. I do not know where you have drawn your implied figure of 27. I have tried to count the items listed in the summary table of the page you quote and my result has been 23. A similar count on the corresponding table on the English Wiki has yielded 22. Yet, as you might perhaps notice, nowhere in either page is it stated that the given lists are supposed to be exhaustive. Moreover, I would expect that you can delimit what constitutes an individual “trial” in more than one way.

However, you might perhaps agree with me that all this figure joggling is in practice rather beside the point. Even if you were right (which I believe is quite possible), and the exact number was actually 27 rather than 109 trials over 25 years, that would still remain a staggering high number. I do not think it would make a very great difference to the substantive argument I have offered in my post. Yet, if you have some reason to think otherwise, I would be very interested in knowing it.

@Black Hawk & @sgxxx: Thank you very much for your figures.

Indeed, the latest recourse to the safety net of the Statute of Limitations in the case against Mr. Mills was certainly not due to Mr. Berlusconi’s allegedly superior skills in profiting from legal loopholes. It was a deliberate choice by Mr. Berlusconi’s accusers, brought about by a very remarkable about-turn by the Cassation prosecutor. And Mr. Berlusconi has since made it abundantly clear that he has not at all welcomed such development.

As a matter of fact, what we have had here was a somewhat arbitrary judicial decision, whose main net effect was to avoid the need for the Cassation Court to enter into the detailed merits of the alleged proofs of guilt. And why should the prosecutor (and the Court) wish to avoid that? My tentative conclusion was that they knew full well that the prosecution evidence was on the whole unsound, and yet had no desire to say openly so, leaving Mr. Berlusconi entirely scot-free. And, if that was anywhere near the truth, it would be the clearest evidence so far that the use of the Statute of Limitations in Berlusconi-related cases can itself be part and parcel of a political use of justice.

Now your startling numbers appear to add some considerable weight to such an hypothesis, particularly as far as the past is concerned. In the light of such figures, it seems to me that no reasonable person can now easily escape the smell of a rather big rat in this full 15-years story.