Temporary Perfections Read Free Page A

myself to quit indulging in clichés, and I walked toward the court chambers.
    My case was one of the first. A mere half hour after the hearing began, it was my turn.
    It only took the reporting advocate a few minutes to summarize the history of the case, explaining the reasoning behind the guilty verdict and then the grounds for my appeal.
    The defendant was the youngest son of a well-known and respected professional in Bari. At the time of his arrest, nearly eight years earlier, he was twenty-one years old, attending law school without much to show for it. He was much more successful as a cocaine dealer. Anyone in certain circles who occasionally wanted or needed some coke—and sometimes other substances—knew his name and number. As a dealer, he was careful, punctual, and reliable. He made home deliveries, so his wealthy customers weren’t obliged to do anything as vulgar as traveling around the city in search of a drug dealer.
    At a certain point, when everyone knew his name and what he was up to, the Carabinieri noticed him, too. They tapped his cell phones and followed him for a few weeks and then, when the time was right, they searched his apartment and garage. It was in the garage that they found almost half a kilo of excellent Venezuelan cocaine. At first, he tried to defend himself by saying that the drugs weren’t his, that everyone else in the building had access to his garage, and that the coke could have belonged to anyone. Then they confronted him with the recordings of the phone calls, and at last he decided, on the advice of his lawyer—me—to availhimself of his right to remain silent. It was a classic case—any further statements could have been used against him.
    After a few months of preventive detention he was placed under house arrest, and a little more than a year after his initial arrest he was released, with the requirement that he remain a resident of the area and show up regularly to sign a register. The trial proceeded at the usual slow pace, and the defense theory, all other chatter aside, was based on a claim that the phone taps were not legitimate evidence. If that objection had been accepted, the prosecution would have had a much weaker case.
    I had raised the issue of the legality of the phone taps in the first criminal trial. But the objection had been dismissed, and the court had sentenced my client to ten years’ imprisonment and a huge fine. I had raised the issue of the lawfulness of the recordings in our first appeal. The appeals court had once again dismissed the argument, but at least the sentence had been reduced.
    I appealed to the Court of Cassation based on the illegality of those phone taps, and that morning I was there in my final attempt to keep my client—who had in the meantime found a real job and a girlfriend and was now the father of a young child—from serving a substantial prison sentence, even after various amnesties, early releases, and so on. In supreme court sessions, normally there’s no audience. The chambers have an abstract solemnity, and—most important—the discussion involves only points of law: The kinds of brutal facts discussed in criminal trials are nowhere to be found in the hushed environment of the supreme court.
    In other words, you might expect the outcome and the setting to be devoid of the emotional edge typical of standard criminal trials.
    That’s not true, though, for one very simple reason.
    When a case is appealed to the highest court, you’re very close to the end of the judicial process. One of the possible outcomes of an appeal is for the court to deny the appeal. And if the Court of Cassation denies an appeal in a case involving a prison sentence, it’s likely that your client’s next step will be to surrender to the prison system and begin serving his time.
    That means a case before this court is hardly an abstract exercise; the seriousness of the outcome transforms the rarefied atmosphere of the chambers and the hearing