They were all about thirty. The men in jackets and ties, the women dressed more freely, some of them pretty. Seen individually, they would have looked like what they were, that is, young adults. Seen all together, they looked like people suspended between being students, almost still adolescents in a way, and what they would soon become as magistrates. Judges and prosecutors, holders of the greatest (legal) power there is. I’ve sometimes asked myself what I would have been like if instead of becoming a defence lawyer I had chosen the magistrature. I’ve never come up with an answer. Some magistrates are like Cotturri, they have an awareness – and are able to preserve it through all the daily grind of their profession – of how inconceivable, even shocking, it is that a man can decide on the freedom and the destiny of another man. They treat this power with the necessary circumspection and a healthy dose of scepticism, especially towards themselves. Others don’t. Everything becomes routine, people become files and papers, and in all this there’s an element of terrible brutality, even if it’s involuntary. I don’t want to be moralistic about it. Of course, it’s much easier to have an awareness 114of the people who are behind or beneath the paperwork if you’re in defence. If you’re a magistrate, though, and every day you’re submerged by cases, arrests, trials to be handled and deadlines to be met, it’s possible – and it’s almost a question of psychological survival – that you forget the fragility of the material you’re dealing with.

I was so absorbed in these ruminations that I almost gave a start when Cotturri handed over to me. I took a last glance at my notes, took a deep breath and began.

“The title of our talk may suggest a discussion of the investigations carried out by the defence. Let me clarify immediately that I won’t be saying a word about investigations carried out by the defence. I’m going to talk about things that at first may strike you as off-topic. I’ll ask you to suspend judgement until the end of this hour, or a little more, that we’ll be spending together, when you’ll be able to give an overall assessment.

“The law, the legal process – the criminal process in particular – are instruments put in place to regulate conflicts, and as such have to deal with the complexity of reality. In the complex reality we’re obliged to confront, there are multiple points of view and reasons are almost always distributed, even if unequally, among the various protagonists of a relationship or a disagreement.

“A great mathematician, Stefan Banach, once said that good mathematicians are capable of grasping analogies. The same goes for jurists. A good jurist, too, is capable of grasping analogies, and to do so, naturally, it’s vital in the first place that they possess the technical know-how.