Justice... sort of

[fpb]

An Italian appeals court awarded former actress Laura Antonelli (whom I mentioned elsewhere in this blog) the enormous sum of 108,000 euros in compensation for ten years of criminal and civil proceedings which had turned out to be vexatious and ill-grounded. In 1992, the police found some 50 grams of cocaine in the actress' villa by the sea, and

Comments

[ravenclaw_eric]

Being a China maven, I like the way this was dealt with in the traditional Chinese codes. Magistrates had very broad powers, up to and including torture, to compel the confession without which nobody could be convicted---but a magistrate who misused those powers (either a person was found to have been wrongly convicted, or died under questioning without a confession) got exactly what he had given out. And the same went for his assistants, who had done the actual grunt-work. No "I was only following orders" could save them.

As I'm sure you can imagine, this made magistrates ve-ry careful.