Due process the one that condemns Juve?

On 19 April, the Coni Board of Guarantee will pronounce itself on the sentence of the Sports Justice which took away 15 points in the standings from Juventus. It is only the second act of a process that promises to be long and full of many other appointments. But what we have already witnessed in this short period of time is so incredible that it leaves anyone who cares about a sense of due process stunned. To the point that whatever decision the Board of Guarantee takes, in favor or against, the doubt that it may have really been an impartial sentence will remain absurd. In this climate of unbearable dogma, more from the Curva Sud than from the courtroom, the magistrate Ciro Santoriello also paid the price, one of the prosecutors of the Prisma investigation, caught, during a public event, saying: «I am fan of Napoli and I hate Juventus. As a fan, Napoli is important, as a public prosecutor I am obviously an anti-Juventus supporter, against thievery on the pitch…”.

Santoriello naively victim of the system

Now, Ciro Santoriello is a magistrate of great value – as anyone who has worked in the Palazzo di Giustizia in Turin well knows, and as even the defenders of the Juventus club were quick to point out – naively remained the victim of a system that made the kick a religion, more fanatical than theological, inconceivably a prisoner of its followers, and after this episode dragged into a meaningless media pillory. His was a declaration not at all serious, only in a conversational and joking tone. There would be nothing wrong with being anti-juventini, and even the writer, although not a fan of Napoli, confesses that he has feelings similar to those of Santoriello and that he wouldn’t even mind seeing Juventus bang for once not to relegate. But Justice is something else, it’s a serious matter, and you can’t confuse it with typhus. Now no one is so utopian as to ask for an American-style trial, which is by definition and constitutional law a fair trial, where the fiction of impartiality does not apply but the rule of tough confrontation between prosecution and defense and where the defense has the same powers of the prosecution. We’re a different country, and that’s okay. Could Santoriello have made that declaration? Of course it was better not. However, he immediately gave up the job. Much more serious that some members of the Coni Guarantee Board have ventured into attacking the same football club on their social networks with Curva ultrà epithets, without anyone, and I repeat anyone, having even thought of asking for their resignations. Simply because in football it is considered normal for sporting justice to be exercised with the trappings of fan support.

Due process is impossible

Under these conditions, due process is impossible, especially in the context of sports justice, which is also subject to a dangerous theorem, according to which you are guilty until proven guilty. But there is a limit to everything. And, as the director of Il Foglio, Claudio Cerasa, a declared Inter fan, wrote in a beautiful endowment, “having a sports justice system transformed into an offshoot of the media process is a spectacle that unfortunately appears pitiful”. Even more so if the drift of sports information even leads some reporters to throw themselves into the San Siro changing rooms after Milan Naples to insult the referee. What guarantee of correctness can these behaviors give? But it happened: sports justice went hand in hand with the media process. Now, leafing through the 36 pages of reasons for the sentence on capital gains, some gaps immediately catch the eye in a more than evident way. The first thing, which many have remarked, is that Juventus is condemned without, however, that the sports justice has identified a counterparty with whom it would have committed that crime. And that already doesn’t make much sense. The fact that the penalty was inflicted during the championship is also quite serious, thus inevitably distorting, in one way or another, and also with the return of points, the course of the season.

The legal opprobrium

But the legal opprobrium lies in the fact that the judges do not explain how it is possible to convict Juventus of a crime that the sports justice itself in the reasons for a sentence a year ago, in which it had acquitted eleven teams, had defined as more than aleatory, because «the value of a footballer is given and born in a free market, moreover, characterized by the need for the simultaneous unanimous will of the two clubs of the footballer concerned». What does this mean? That if you decide that that’s not a crime you can’t set up another trial for that same crime. Even worse is to condemn her on the basis of a new accusation, that of sporting disloyalty, which you did not challenge when calling her to trial, thus not allowing the defendant to defend himself.

How to issue judgments on these grounds?

Where can processes be built and sentences issued on these bases? I do not know. Perhaps only in one scheme. But is football really a regime in which sports justice can do whatever it wants, even dealing with things that would only concern ordinary justice? In many cases, think of racism and violence in stadiums, it would seem not, it seems more like a blunt weapon, almost powerless, in the face of certain behaviors bordering on the limit of the law, and even beyond. This process on capital gains, so absurd and Kafkaesque, could also end with tarallucci and wine, we joked, everything as before, except that we are only at the beginning of the story, and that the second part of the Prisma investigation risks weighing a boulder on the shoulders of the company if there was evidence of the crime of false corporate communications due to undue concealment of salaries. But with everything that has happened so far, with this media and judicial system behind it, where the football faith is on a higher pedestal than the rule of law, how far can we still trust? As Claudio Cerasa says, «having a sporting justice system that acts as the kick drum of the media process, which chooses to replace the judiciary and which chooses to transform suspicions into evidence is the worst way to be able to say that justice has been and it will be done.”