It is not a judgement: the Rossi case and the judiciary’s cardinal sin

Yesterday, in a gym at the Foro Italico, a window identical to the one in David Rossi’s office in Rocca Salimbeni was reconstructed. A member of the Carabinieri, of a similar build to Rossi, simulated the victim’s movements; the consultants tested scenarios involving one, two and three attackers. According to Gianluca Vinci, chair of the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry, initial findings suggest that Rossi may have tried to defend himself against several people. But one fact stands out: thirteen years after a death that was twice ruled a suicide, experiments are still being carried out on the dynamics of the fall.

In the Rossi case, the decisive factor is the initial hypothesis. “Initially, everything pointed to suicide,” said the Sienese judicial authorities. But a hypothesis, if it becomes a framework too soon, ends up filtering out evidence that does not fit. The parliamentary commission established that Rossi’s office had been altered before the forensic team’s inspection. Some bloodstained tissues, which years later the consultants would have liked to analyse in search of third-party DNA, had already been destroyed. The problem is not only what was not found: it is what can no longer be found.

There is also a second limitation. The justice system is equipped to establish individual criminal liability, but less so to recognise an investigative failure that does not also constitute a criminal offence. In 2023, the investigating magistrate in Genoa dismissed the investigation into the three Siena public prosecutors accused of forgery: no intent to conceal evidence was established. Criminal liability and the quality of judicial proceedings are not one and the same.

The third limitation is the institution’s difficulty in correcting itself. When an initial reconstruction is set in stone through official documents and expert reports, subsequent proceedings tend to be measured against that reconstruction rather than starting afresh from the evidence. Time erodes evidence and the possibility of verification. The 2022 parliamentary report highlighted ‘gaps’ in the investigations.

It took journalists, family members, two parliamentary committees, new expert reports and thirteen years for the alternative hypothesis to prompt the Siena Public Prosecutor’s Office to open a new case in 2026 and for the Committee to declare that its findings rule out suicide and point to the involvement of a third party. These are different processes: the Committee does not pass judgement, and the new investigation will have to verify those conclusions.

The lesson is not that the judiciary “got it all wrong”. It is more disturbing than that: the justice system can make mistakes even without any villains involved, and when it gets it wrong at the outset, it can make it almost impossible to set things right in the end. The Rossi case should serve as a textbook example: greater rigour is needed in the preservation of evidence, and a clearer separation must be maintained between those who formulate a hypothesis and those tasked with testing it.