In recent days, the investigations on the “white one”, the gang of robbers and killers who put Emilia at the beginning of the nineties, have been reopened in Bologna. Over thirty years ago, and in the meantime, those who were sentenced have almost completely taken for granted the penalties that had been inflicted on them. In recent days, the Palermo prosecutor’s office has put his hand to the file on the assassination of Piersanti Mattarella. Two weeks ago in Portugal we returned to talk about the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, the seven -year -old English girl who has disappeared and never found again. New research from techniques not available at the time. What happened and happens to Garlasco is not the case to dwell, given the space that the story has returned to take in the newspapers. On the dirty manta of blood that at the time no one had been able to decrypt now are filling pages and newspaper pages for weeks.

Progress or obsession

All this, as we mentioned, was possible thanks to the fact that compared to when the investigations have been started and led to convictions or acquittals, in certain cases to sensational nothing done, the technology has made great strides, and what twenty or thirty years ago was impossible to understand, now with a simple DNA test, the use of tables, telephone cells, tracks on the web, of cameras that resume every moment and Of our daily lives, here thanks to all this the horizons of the investigations have radically changed. Someone jokingly came to hypothesize the reopening of the Piccioni case or perhaps reopening on the reopening will be a new investigation into the murder of Julius Caesar. Are we sure that it was only Brutus who killed the great leader and not there were others who treated their assassin hand? Isn’t it appropriate to resurrect a few old rest in the Roman Forum in search of a unwanted imprint, a trace of DNA? Provocations, of course, which however make the idea of ​​the climate.

When modern technologies are really useful

At this point, a space of public reflection opens to which we are all called, and potentially of debate: where the right need ends to pursue crimes already examined but in certain cases not entirely discovered, the need to arrest some killer in freedom and the opposite where the obvious consideration resides that justice (magistrates, policemen, investigators) would do well to focus on the present, since they are not lacking and Most fresh and easy to identify? Will it be not that all this tendency to look to the past in search of the title in the investigation that everyone knows (Garlasco, Mattarella, one white) and therefore in themselves it makes “listening” more than satisfying a real investigative need to meet the almost voyeuristic trend of the “audience” to make everything a good show for black news broadcasts? That there is better than a live CSI, every day a new episode but this time not invented … remember that the crime, the crime programs, is in fact now one of the most followed genre and each of the investigations that we have mentioned only gives the listening to certain TV lounges …

The chain chain of the cases that we have just remembered is not accidental but nobody has the right answer to the doubt that we have reported, as always happens when the reason is not all from the usual part. As you know, murder is the only crime that never goes into prescription, and there will be an evident reason. The legislator, providing for this specification, wanted to make it clear that in the face of the possibility of ensuring a murderer to justice, one must not stop in front and nothing, not even to the passing time. The point is, however, that sometimes he puts himself back to investigation because now technologies are now available once imaginable but there are no truly new or concrete hypotheses, and it seems that the investigators follow more suggestions than anything else.

The emblematic case of grass

The case of reopening the grass process, in recent months, is a clear example: weeks and weeks of discussions, a new process and a new hole in the water. How much did all this cost the state? In the meantime, however, the schedules of the crime broadcasts had been filled, the usual alleged experts of fifteen or twenty years ago this time a little more aged, the murderers have revised the killers already sentenced with the signs of the age on the face, the usual indications of the rays, the usual clues of the past, have been shown to give the duty to give the novelty, have been spoken for hours and hours.

The prosecutors who started the new investigation had their moment of celebrity, and even the investigators ended up in the news, as perhaps it would not have happened if they had dealt with a “normal” crime that nobody knows. An old case always makes news, and the use of a new method of investigation, the latest finding of the technique, brings luster to those who use it and maybe make him make a career faster. We are extreme, of course, because it can also happen that in fact they emerge over time actually new facts, and then there is nothing more urgent than making real justice, the one that brings behind the bars a culprit now in freedom and the opposite rehabilitates those who had been unjustly condemned. But a reflection will be appropriate to start it.