Free Pushing Past the Night by Mario Calabresi

services. I asked to see how the system worked. They took me to the control room. There was a giant illuminated map of the city on the wall, with pushpins to indicate where the ambulances were stationed. They showed me where the ambulance for Pinelli had originated and the time it had been called. They took the register and opened it to the fifteenth of December. On that day, it was recorded that at exactly 12:01 a.m., the Piazza Cinque Giornate ambulance had been called. So we did a test to see how long it would take for an ambulanceto make it to police headquarters, because according to rumor Pinelli’s body had been left on the ground for hours. We were able to determine, instead, that the ambulance had only taken a few minutes. The time of the fall and the time of the call coincided perfectly. There was no conspiracy.
    The truth serum
. There was a needle mark in Pinelli’s arm. Some people claimed that at police headquarters he had been injected with a dose of scopolamine, truth serum, after which Pinelli felt sick, which is why they threw him from the window. I went to the emergency room, where the doctor on duty told me, “Always the same old story! Go check the newspapers. I can remember a photographer coming in and taking pictures.” In the
Corriere della Sera
I found the picture of Pinelli with an intravenous needle in his arm. So his bruise was caused by the intravenous therapy that the hospital had administered to save his life. I went to the newspaper’s offices, had the negatives of the picture confiscated, printed them, and put them in the file.
    The karate chop
. The autopsy mentioned an oval bruise. Claims were made that it had been caused by a karate chop. We conducted an examination after exhuming the body and established that there had been no karate chop. The bruise, as the experts explained, was caused by the amount of time the body had been lying on the marble slab in the morgue.
    The fall
. There was yet more “proof”: the site where the body had fallen. I made a second round of phone calls to the stretcher bearers, the ambulance personnel, the people who were there, and I asked them to indicate the point of impact. We could see that the trajectory coincided exactly with the broken branches on a large bush that had been photographed the day after Pinelli’s death. There was also damage to the cornice below the window from which he had fallen.
    You can’t imagine the dirty looks I got from Police Commissioner Guida when I was conducting these forensic testsat police headquarters. He couldn’t believe that a magistrate would dare come to their “inner sanctum” to investigate the police for murder …
    Only one witness indicated a different point of impact, which was further away. He was a reporter for
Unità
, an elderly man who couldn’t muster the courage to get closer to Pinelli. He gave a very general indication. In my ruling, I stated clearly that we had to establish the reliability of the texts, and that the texts indicating the first point were more credible. While I was writing my acquittal,
Panorama
—which was a left-wing magazine in those days—published the opinion of a group of physics professors (still quoted by
Liberazione
today). They wanted to prove that Pinelli’s body had not fallen five feet from the wall, as I had argued on the basis of an objective examination, but more than sixteen feet further away. They used the point indicated by the
Unità
reporter, which was eight or nine yards away from the wall, and calculated the average between the points indicated by the eyewitnesses. In my ruling, I was quick to caution them: be careful, my dear physicists, depositions cannot be assessed mathematically; otherwise there would be no need for judges. Proof has to be assessed on the basis of reliability, which can only be obtained through objective studies. Two or three years later, someone knocked on my door. I