ITALY: Fresh Start

One of the ironies of history is that in the land where once the Romans hammered out the basic statutes of law and justice for the Western world, their successors in the modern nation of Italy are caught in as tangled and Kafkaesque a legal code as besets any country. Wrestling with precedents that go back to the Twelve Tables of 450 B.C., to the Caesars and Hadrian and Justinian, plagued by remnants of the Code Napoleon and the harsh Fascist glorifications of police and state, baffled judges let dockets pile up. Cases drag on, and prisons overflow with prisoners still awaiting trial. The solution: a periodic amnesty.

"The harshness of absolute regimes," said an Italian lawyer last week, "was mitigated in two ways. One was regicide. The other was amnesty—the sovereign's gift of grace. We still have amnesty—so, for the next six months, don't leave your car unattended, and keep your hand on your wallet." Under the fourth general amnesty since 1945, signed into law by President Giovanni Gronchi last week, some 15,000 convicted criminals—and perhaps as many as 100,000 offenders still unsentenced—will walk scot-free out of Italy's jails. Unlike a pardon, which wipes out the penalty, an amnesty expunges the crime. The categories of criminals admitted to amnesty last week included libelers, common thieves, tax evaders, those who have offered "offenses to the head of the state," first offenders serving no more than two years, pornographers, and—most controversially—Communists and Fascists convicted of political crimes during the chaotic years between 1943 and 1946 in Italy. Although political criminals make up no more than 2% of the amnestied, they include the "Red Devil" Moranino (TIME, April 30, 1956), who had taken refuge behind the Iron Curtain, and two of the men involved in the Communist wartime theft of the fabled gold of Dongo.

Since ancient times amnesty has been used ceremonially ("Whom will ye that I release unto you? Barabbas or Jesus?") by authoritarian governments to placate their people. But modern Italy's need of amnesty springs from the basic injustices of its present laws and the overcrowding of its jails. The Italian constitution of 1948 provides for a form of habeas corpus and declares the citizen innocent until proved guilty, but under Italy's outmoded legal procedures and the operation of Italy's judges—most of whom, while not Fascists, got their legal training under Fascism—suspects often languish years in jail awaiting trial. As one Italian lawyer put it last week: "The amnesty is a shotgun blasting at ills that shouldn't exist in the first place."