Customer Reviews

The Judge and the Historian: Marginal Notes on a Late-Twentieth-Century Miscarriage of Justice

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This little book by Carlo Ginzburg is another J'accuse, Zola's powerful indictment of the "investigation" which framed Captain Dreyfus for the espionage he had not committed. The case Ginzburg exposes here is that of three Italian leftists accused of having commissioned (and committed) the murder of a notorious right-wing police investigator in 1972. As Ginzburg makes amply clear, the case at hand is extremely weak and the conviction of the three former leftists a clear miscarriage of justice. The case rests entirely on the plea bargaining representations of someone who in the 1970s had been a close comrade of the three men, and who claims to have been the getaway driver in the murder. Allegedly overcome by guilt, this man decided to tell all to the police, some twenty years after the murder and just a short while before the stature of limitations for the crime expired. Again, as Ginzburg ably shows, the testimony of the would-be driver is full of contradictions, inconsistencies and inaccuracies, and the court that convicted the three went to extreme lengths to discard reliable eyewitness accounts of the murder to accept the self-styled driver's version(s) of events. Unfortunately, the book is not especially reader-friendly. It requires close reading and would probably not appeal very much to someone not conversant with the intricacies of Italian politics and the Byzantine nature of the Italian legal system which can convict someone on clearly flimsy evidence. Such weknesses in the book are a shame, because the issues involved here are potentially of wide appeal. They are also of great relevance to readers interested in history, because of the issues of evidence and proof raised. Ginzburg is a famous historian who has justly earned a world reputation with pathbreaking books like THE NIGHT BATTLES (his first and, to my mind, his best) and THE CHEESE AND THE WORMS (both of which, incidentally, I strongly rtecommend). Those works are based on trial evidence from early modern Italian courts run by the Inquisition, and in the present work, Ginzburg shows the amazing similarity between the investigative procedures for establishing guilt used by the Inquisition more than three-hundred years ago and those used by the modern-day judges who convicted the three men accused of the 1972 murder. Still, THE JUDGE AND THE HISTORIAN makes no attempt to help a reader unfamiliar with the tortured history of Italian politics since the 1970s, and so will prove difficult (and worse, tedious) to all but the bravest. Yet a simple re-drafting could have made this a besteller and brought this case of injustice to world attention.

The 9-year-old review by Mr. Calabria is entirely accurate and fair in its consideration of the portion of this book that deals with the political issues of Italian justice, or rather injustice. I've lived in Italy, and I am familiar with the course of Italian politics over the past 50 years, but I also found the "case" that Carlo Ginzburg makes hard to follow. Ginzburg has shown consummate literary gifts in other books, and it is a shame that he didn't choose to make this important book more intelligible to a larger audience.

However, there's another aspect to the book -- effectively another theme -- which is implied by the title in English, "The Judge and the Historian". Ginzburg raises questions of the comparative use of evidence and the delivery of "verdicts" by practitioners of historiography versus jurisprudence. In just the first twelve pages of his text, Ginzburg surveys the "history of history" to demonstrate how the methods and purposes of the 'science' have evolved, from its beginnings in ancient Greece to its present state. Frankly, I couldn't condense these 12 brilliant pages into an amazon review even if I tried, so you'll just need to get the book, by hook or crook, and ponder his insights for yourself. My five-star rating is based on that aspect of the text.