Word: valpreda
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Since then, Valpreda and his co-defendants have endured a Kafkaesque nightmare: nearly three years in prison without any resolution of their case. Their plight has focused attention on what Turin's moderate newspaper La Stampa called "the injustice of justice" in Italy, and has drawn the sympathy of concerned citizens who have little use for terrorist bombings or anarchism...
...case against the anarchists is based on fairly thin circumstantial evidence. The day after Valpreda's arrest, a Milan taxi driver told police that he recognized the suspect-from an old photograph-as the man with a briefcase whom he had driven 135 yards from a cabstand to the bank shortly before the explosion. He later testified that police told him the photograph "was the one I had to recognize." The cabby, who happened to be an alcoholic, died of cirrhosis of the liver before Valpreda came to trial, leaving unanswered the question of why a terrorist would risk...
Adding to the confusion is the recent discovery of evidence suggesting that Valpreda and his friends may be innocent. Last August district attorneys who were investigating other terrorist acts charged two neo-Fascists with the Milan bombing. A consignment of 50 clockwork timers, exactly like those used in the bombings, was traced to one of the suspects, a bookseller from Padua named Franco Freda. Furthermore, the briefcases in which the bombs were hidden were all purchased in a Padua store only a block from Freda's bookshop. Worst of all, it now appears that high-ranking police officials tried...
Perhaps the single most shocking aspect of the case is that even if the Fascists are indicted, tried and convicted of the Milan massacre, Valpreda and his co-defendants can still be condemned for the same crime. This legal absurdity has had the positive effect of stirring up public pressure to reform Italy's anachronistic penal laws; among other things, they allow some suspects to be held for up to four years before trial. Last week, the Council of Ministers approved a draft bill that, if voted into law by both houses of Parliament, would permit judges to grant...
Meanwhile, the anarchists are still in prison. Valpreda has summed up his harrowing experience in a collection of bitter letters called Letters from the Prison of the System. "In the movies," he wrote, "[imprisonment] can be painful, but it's always in a certain intellectualized way. In reality there's only suffering, hate, stink, sickness. The blond hero who comes to lead his men after years in the dungeon doesn't exist. What comes out is a tired person who stinks or is tubercular. That's the reality...