Those who make a mistake (and don’t have white collars) pay. For everyone.
This seems to be the moral of the sad story of corso Buenos Aires, Milano.

Do you remember the 25 young people arrested after the disorder of 11 March? The disorder that erupted as a reaction to the fascist demonstration? We have left them behind the bars of San Vittore.

They are still there. They’ve been there for more than 4 months. They are presumed guilty waiting for a judgement.

Next Wednesday the decision is expected. The prosecutor has asked for exemplary sentences: 5 years and 8 months of prison for those who had no previous convictions, that would be 6 years for two of the young people with previous convictions. And what luck that for the shortened procedure the sentence is reduced by a third!
The accusations form an anthology of the penal code: moral and material participation in devastation and fire-raising, resistance and violence to a public official, seditious gathering, injurious activity, abusive carrying of weapons. The catch is hidden in that “moral participation”: precise proof showing the responsibility of individuals, necessary in a State based on rights, is not available, that’s what the lawyers have been saying over and over again.

They have asked for the defendants to be absolved (apart from a couple who prefer to do a plea bargain). They’ve done this after asking in vain for house arrest which was denied on the grounds that there was a risk they would escape or they would repeat the crime (!), perhaps they were afraid the young people would set fire to the settee in the living room.
To complete the picture, the civil plaintiffs, the Milan local authorities and the Ministries of Defence and of the Interior have asked for 290,000 Euro in damages.
In this video, prepared by Piero Ricca, there’s an interview with the lawyer Mirko Mazzali, who is defending most of the defendants and the teacher Tiziana Ferrario who explains how one of the prisoners, Riccardo, aged 19, now in a cell with a kidnapper after a few weeks of being in isolation, has not been allowed to finish the scholastic year of study.

This is naturally a way of honouring to the bitter end, the re-education objective of the punishment. I’ve been thinking: if one of our offspring were to find themselves at a demonstration, if they were arrested without having committed any crime except that of protesting, if they were detained for months without trial and kept in isolation, if they weren’t even allowed to study; what would we, fathers, mothers, what should we be thinking? That Italy is not a State based on rights? That in Italy the law is equal only for Previti?