A Fine Line Read Free Page A

state. Above all, there had been no real activity on the part of the defence. As things stood, the trial could easily end with a guilty verdict, and the minimum sentence for sexual assault is five years.
    *
    When I had finished speaking, the presiding judge turned first right, then left, to look at the associate judges. They were two demure-looking women – one with hair tied in a ponytail, the other with hair gathered in a bun kept in place by a chopstick – wearing the expressions of people who would have preferred to be somewhere else. It’s the kind of expression that’s almost a professional disease for those who’ve been associate judges for too long. It seems like interesting work, and to an extent it is. For a few months, if you get the right trials. But sitting there three times a week, for years on end, listening to witnesses, defence lawyers, prosecutors and defendants (each category produces its fair amount of nonsense or worse), without saying a word out loud (the only person who opens his mouth is the presiding judge) would be enough to fry anyone’s brains. I’d have gone crazy.
    Anyway, as I was saying, the judge exchanged rapid glances with his associates to see if they had any observations to make. Both barely moved their heads. That meant no, they had no observations, and yes, they were fine with my motion.
    â€œProsecutor?”
    Assistant Prosecutor Castroni was a very polite person, a nice man in his way, disinclined to get caught up in legal subtleties. He got to his feet and said that he had no observations, no particular motion to make, and no objection to the injured party being examined.
    â€œVery well, then, we have said that the witness is present. Let’s hear her,” the presiding judge said to the bailiff, who went into the witness room and emerged a few moments later with an attractive young woman. Attractive but with something dull about her bearing and features. A tall, shapely, dull brunette.
    She looked around almost furtively, like a scared animal ready to attack in self-defence. The kind of witness – actually,the kind of person – you have to be particularly careful with. Only when she realized that the defendant wasn’t in court did she seem to relax a little.
    The judge asked her to read the formula of commitment. It used to be called the oath, the sentence witnesses had to recite before making their statement. When I started work as a lawyer, before the new – now old – code for criminal procedure was approved, the oath still existed. I know it by heart: “Conscious of the responsibility that with this oath I assume before God, if a believer, and before men, I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”
    There was a perfect balance between drama and farce in the rising cadence of that admonition that lent itself to being mangled in the most surreal ways. My favourite one was when people, nervous at being in court, asked for the formula to be repeated and then swore that they would tell anything but the truth . Which of course is what happens in most testimony, irrespective of the witness’s good faith.
    Then, with the new code that was introduced in 1989, it was considered that taking an oath was somewhat inelegant and ill-suited to a secular State, and the law introduced a formula of commitment, which goes like this: “Conscious of the moral and legal responsibility I assume with my testimony, I commit myself to tell the whole truth and not to conceal anything of which I have knowledge.” More correct, certainly, but much less poetic.
    This was what our witness recited, reading from a dirty laminated card.
    Judge Basile made her give her particulars – the most pointless of obligations, given that these particulars were already on at least six or seven documents in the case file – and at last gave the prosecutor the floor.
    â€œThank you, Your Honour,” Castroni