3.

When you argue before the Court of Cassation, the first thing you do is rent a black robe.

The dress code of Italy’s highest court requires that all lawyers wear a black robe, but—except for lawyers who practice in Rome—almost no one actually owns one. And so you have to rent one, as if you were acting in a play or attending a Carnival masquerade party.

As usual, there was a short line at the robe rental room. I looked around in search of familiar faces, but there was no one I knew. Instead, standing in line ahead of me was a guy who was, to judge from his appearance, the product of repeated, passionate couplings between close blood relatives. His eyebrows were very bushy and jet black. His hair was dyed an unnatural blond with red highlights. He had a jaw that jutted out in front of him, and he was wearing a forest green jacket that looked vaguely Tyrolean in style. I imagined his mug shot in the newspaper under the headline “Police Break Up Ring of Child Molesters,” or proudly posing on a political campaign poster alongside a virulently racist slogan.

I took my rented robe and forced myself to refrain from sniffing it; doing so would have resulted in suffering a queasy sense of disgust for the rest of the morning. As usual, I mused for a few seconds about how many lawyers had worn it before me and the stories they could tell. Then, also as usual, I told myself to quit indulging in clichés, and I walked toward the court chambers.

My case was one of the first. A mere half hour after the hearing began, it was my turn.

It only took the reporting advocate a few minutes to summarize the history of the case, explaining the reasoning behind the guilty verdict and then the grounds for my appeal.

The defendant was the youngest son of a well-known and respected professional in Bari. At the time of his arrest, nearly eight years earlier, he was twenty-one years old, attending law school without much to show for it. He was much more successful as a cocaine dealer. Anyone in certain circles who occasionally wanted or needed some coke—and sometimes other substances—knew his name and number. As a dealer, he was careful, punctual, and reliable. He made home deliveries, so his wealthy customers weren’t obliged to do anything as vulgar as traveling around the city in search of a drug dealer.

At a certain point, when everyone knew his name and what he was up to, the Carabinieri noticed him, too. They tapped his cell phones and followed him for a few weeks and then, when the time was right, they searched his apartment and garage. It was in the garage that they found almost half a kilo of excellent Venezuelan cocaine. At first, he tried to defend himself by saying that the drugs weren’t his, that everyone else in the building had access to his garage, and that the coke could have belonged to anyone. Then they confronted him with the recordings of the phone calls, and at last he decided, on the advice of his lawyer—me—to avail himself of his right to remain silent. It was a classic case—any further statements could have been used against him.

After a few months of preventive detention he was placed under house arrest, and a little more than a year after his initial arrest he was released, with the requirement that he remain a resident of the area and show up regularly to sign a register. The trial proceeded at the usual slow pace, and the defense theory, all other chatter aside, was based on a claim that the phone taps were not legitimate evidence. If that objection had been accepted, the prosecution would have had a much weaker case.

I had raised the issue of the legality of the phone taps in the first criminal trial. But the objection had been dismissed, and the court had sentenced my client to ten years’ imprisonment and a huge fine. I had raised the issue of the lawfulness of the recordings in our first appeal. The appeals court had once again dismissed the argument, but at least the sentence had been reduced.

I appealed to the Court of Cassation based on the illegality of those phone taps, and that morning I was there in my final attempt to keep my client—who had in the meantime found a real job and a girlfriend and was now the father of a young child—from serving a substantial prison sentence, even after various amnesties, early releases, and so on. In supreme court sessions, normally there’s no audience. The chambers have an abstract solemnity, and—most important—the discussion involves only points of law: The kinds of brutal facts discussed in criminal trials are nowhere to be found in the hushed environment of the supreme court.

In other words, you might expect the outcome and the setting to be devoid of the emotional edge typical of standard criminal trials.

That’s not true, though, for one very simple reason.

When a case is appealed to the highest court, you’re very close to the end of the judicial process. One of the possible outcomes of an appeal is for the court to deny the appeal. And if the Court of Cassation denies an appeal in a case involving a prison sentence, it’s likely that your client’s next step will be to surrender to the prison system and begin serving his time.

That means a case before this court is hardly an abstract exercise; the seriousness of the outcome transforms the rarefied atmosphere of the chambers and the hearing into a dramatic foreshadowing of things that are anything but rarefied, and frequently frightening.

The advocate general called for the dismissal of my appeal. He spoke briefly, but it was evident that he had studied the facts of the case, which isn’t always true. He made a strong argument against the basis of my appeal, and I thought that if I had been one of the justices, I would have found him persuasive and I would have ruled against the appellant.

Then the chief justice addressed me, saying, “Counselor, the panel of judges has read your appeal as well as your brief. Your point of view has been set forth quite clearly. Therefore, in oral argument, I’d ask you to stick to the fundamental aspects of the law or to matters that were not treated in the appeal or the brief.”

Very courteous and very clear. Please be quick, refrain from repeating the things we already know, and above all, don’t waste the court’s time.

“Thank you, sir. I’ll try to be concise.”

I was quite concise. I went back over the reasons why I believed those wiretaps should be excluded as evidence, and the verdict should be overturned, and in a little more than five minutes, I was done. The chief justice thanked me for having kept my promise to be brief, courteously told me I was free to go, and called the next case. The decision would be announced that afternoon. In the Court of Cassation, the judges hear oral arguments for all the appeals first, and then they retire for deliberations. They emerge, sometimes quite late in the day, and read all the decisions, one after the other. Usually, they read them to an empty courtroom because no one wants to wait for hours and hours in the hallways, surrounded by unsettling marble statues, amidst the echo of lost footsteps. For lawyers, especially those like me who are only in town for the day, this is how it works: You ask one of the clerks to inform you of the decision in your case, and you hand him a folded sheet of paper with your cell phone number written on it, folded around a twenty Euro bill.

Then you leave the court building, and from that moment on, every time your cell phone rings, your stomach lurches, because it might be the clerk, calling to inform you of the verdict in a chilly, bureaucratic tone.

It happened while I was in the airport; the plane was already boarding, and I was about to turn off my phone.

“Counselor Guerrieri?”

“Yes?”

“The court’s verdict on your appeal is in. The appeal was denied, court costs to be paid by the appellant. Good evening.”

“Good evening,” I said, though only my cell phone heard me—the clerk had already hung up, and was already phoning someone else to dispense his own personal verdict for a (modest) fee.

On the plane, I tried to read, but couldn’t. I thought about having to tell my client that in just a few days he would be walking into a prison and staying there for many years. The prospect of that conversation put me in a grim mood of sadness mixed with a brooding sense of humiliation.

I know. He was a drug dealer, a criminal, and if they hadn’t caught him, he might have gone on selling drugs and profiting from them. But in the years between his arrest and the verdict, he’d become another person. It struck me as intolerable that the past should just leap up, in the form of a cruel, clear-cut verdict, and wreak havoc like that.

I thought it was a travesty for this to happen so many years after the fact, and it seemed even more senseless because there was no one to blame.

With these thoughts racing through my mind, I dropped off into a troubled sleep. When I opened my eyes again, the lights of the city were looming close.