Former head of the ‘red judges’ opposes investigations based on nothing

The Party of the Honest, as you know, is that informal association made up of individuals who proclaim themselves to be special and who, in the name of a self-attributed ethical superiority, feel perfectly justified in handing out certificates of morality in political, social and cultural debates. Among the key figures in the Party of the Honest – a party which, being morally superior to any other entity in our country’s public life, tends to regard itself as infallible – there are many individuals from the judiciary who, by virtue of their unquestionable ethics, tend to turn a blind eye when the pursuit of the greater good by their followers is carried out even through inappropriate means. If you are a member of the Party of the Honest – and are inclined to always seek the greater good – whatever means you use to achieve your goal will be justified by that very goal. On this basis, therefore, it is very rare to see one magistrate criticise another who uses methods of dubious ethical standing to pursue objectives deemed ethical.

It is very rare, so to speak, to see a magistrate who has the courage to criticise the judiciary when it oversteps its bounds, when it runs riot, when it uses investigations as a weapon, when it opens cases based more on theories than on evidence, when it resorts to vague formulations rather than smoking guns, when it uses notices of investigation to add fuel to the fire of trials played out in the studios of talk shows rather than to those held in courtrooms, and when it perhaps utilises the machinery of the media trial to make the suspects serve a sentence that it knows it will never be able to enforce through the strength of the evidence. It is rare to see a magistrate who, faced with the excesses of the ‘Party of the Honest’, honestly states that pursuing the good by doing wrong is not one of those ends that can justify the means.

Everything changes, however, if an honest person ends up at the centre of the smear campaign, at the centre of the mudslinging, at the centre of the wrist-slapping, as they say. And in this specific case, everything changes when a magistrate ends up being tarnished by a justice system gone mad, which uses nothing at all to launch investigations serving only to perpetuate theories. Or rather, two magistrates.

Nello Rossi is a former magistrate with a distinguished career. Today he is editor-in-chief of Questione giustizia, the official journal of Magistratura Democratica, one of the most well-organised and left-leaning factions within the judiciary. He has served as deputy public prosecutor in Rome, as Advocate General at the Court of Cassation, as a member of the High Council of the Judiciary (CSM), as president of Magistratura Democratica, and as secretary of the National Association of Magistrates (ANM). He is one of the leading figures of the progressive judiciary and, two days ago, in the magazine he edits, he published a scathing, hard-hitting and simply perfect article denouncing the cover-up – carried out, as Rossi puts it, by a public prosecutor’s office and a media system that offers little protection of individual rights – against two prominent former magistrates: Gioacchino Natoli and Giuseppe Pignatone. As readers may recall, the two former magistrates were investigated by the Caltanissetta Public Prosecutor’s Office on charges of having covered up a Mafia-linked public procurement scandal in 1992, thereby favouring Cosa Nostra. The case was dismissed in October 2026 due to insufficient evidence.

In a passionate piece, Rossi does not hold back and denounces the reprehensible methods used by the Caltanissetta Public Prosecutor’s Office to prove its theories. Rossi rightly points out that a public prosecutor’s office which chooses to investigate someone whilst knowing that the offence would be time-barred is a public prosecutor’s office that chooses to commit an improper act; for when an investigation has no hope of reaching a conclusion, that investigation cannot be opened. Rossi, however, in his scathing j’accuse against the Caltanissetta Public Prosecutor’s Office, does something more important than merely denouncing the opportunistic manner in which magistrates can, at times, open investigations to engage in something other than a simple judicial inquiry (Natoli and Pignatone, according to Rossi, were “the blameless collateral victims of a legal-political clash over whom silence must not fall”).

Rossi goes much further. Rossi argues that notices of investigation must not be used carelessly because, in journalistic parlance, they transform those under investigation into ‘suspects’, casting a shadow of suspicion over those who receive such a notice – a shadow that never lifts, as Luciano Ligabue might have sung on other matters. He argues that a healthy justice system cannot conduct investigations simply for the sake of it because, drum roll, ‘devoting public energy and resources to criminal proceedings with no possible outcome is precisely what a public prosecutor’s office should not do’. Rossi states, categorically, that “there should be no place for vague and allusive statements in a judicial document” and reiterates how serious it is, in his view, to investigate someone without sufficient grounds to do so, given that the media furore accompanying a notice of investigation “is a source of unjustified moral suffering and serious damage to one’s reputation”.

Rossi, with a good dose of courage, even goes so far as to expose yet another sacred cow of the ‘republic of the honest’ and, drawing on an article published months ago by Professor Giovanni Fiandaca, describes the Anti-Mafia Commission as a dangerous catalyst for the ‘republic of suspicion’ (the investigations, which were never meant to happen, have turned into accusations and suspicions, and every inference has been ‘exaggerated out of all proportion by the media platform provided by the Anti-Mafia Commission’s public hearings’), thereby acknowledging not only that criticising the work of a public prosecutor’s office does not mean seeking to discredit the judiciary, but also that criticising the Anti-Mafia Commission does not mean being a friend of the Mafia.

At the end of his piece, Rossi complains about the defenders of due process who, with the exception of Il Foglio, have been conspicuously absent in recent months, and wonders whether they have remained silent because “the victims of an ill-advised judicial initiative were two magistrates”. In the heat of the moment, however, Rossi may have overlooked one detail. The absence of due process, apart from a few minor, commendable exceptions, in the case of Pignatone and Natoli is a fact. What the magistrates who were sharing Rossi’s article in their chat groups yesterday afternoon ought to realise is that the problem highlighted by the article written by the former president of Md and the former secretary of the ANM is that the Party of the Honest tends to take offence at dishonesty only when it is the self-proclaimed honest ones who are bearing the brunt of the media-judicial circus.

The magistrates at the Caltanissetta Public Prosecutor’s Office, who have built an investigation based on nothing and who have chosen to set the wheels of the media circus in motion in an attempt to cover up their own inability to produce anything other than theoretical constructs, are not aliens from Mars espousing an anomalous vision of justice. They are, unfortunately, the perfect embodiment of a world that the judiciary only takes notice of when it is directly affected.

A world in which flimsy investigations – launched without evidence against those branded by the Party of the Honest as enemies of the people – do not make the news, because the end often justifies the means. A world in which the cover-ups perpetrated by public prosecutors’ offices that have gone beyond all bounds do not make the news because the spirit of professional solidarity prevents us from criticising a magistrate who makes a mistake – for the Party of the Honest has taught us to regard any criticism of a magistrate as an attack on the profession, except on those occasions when it is the magistrates themselves who are being covered up. A world in which investigations that are fabricated to prove a point, to lend credence to a theory, rather than to prosecute crimes, no longer make the news because they have become the norm.

And when the judiciary expresses outrage at the way in which two prominent magistrates have been treated by the judiciary, it should ask itself whether raising its voice solely to protect members of the Party of the Honest is part of the solution or part of the problem, so that we can all work towards a judiciary committed to protecting the rule of law, which continues to be violated when those who suffer what two honest magistrates have endured in recent months are people who do not belong to the Party of the Honest. Even if, quite frankly, it is a little late, it is a wake-up call.