Feb 29 2008
Italy Blames Slow Justice as Mafia Boss´ Son Walks
The 28-year-old son of the jailed ´boss of bosses´ Salvatore ´Toto´ Riina smiled as he left Sicily´s maximum security prison.
The release from prison of the most feared Sicilian Mafia boss’s son on a technicality has prompted withering criticism of Italy’s justice system, described by one top judge as the slowest in the European Union.
The 28-year-old son of the jailed “boss of bosses” Salvatore “Toto” Riina smiled as he left Sicily’s maximum security prison, sporting a pink jumper and white bodywarmer. Met by his mother, he was whisked off to his hometown Corleone in a black Mercedes.
Prosecutors, who have scored spectacular successes against the Sicilian Costa Nostra and its regional rivals in Naples and Calabria, said they were bitter at Riina Junior’s release.
Giuseppe Salvatore Riina — whose father, nicknamed “The Beast” for his brutality, was jailed in 1993 and whose elder brother is doing life for murder — went free on Thursday after six years in custody because his trial took too long.
Arrested in 2002 for extortion, money laundering and Mafia membership, he was sentenced to 14 years. The first two charges were later dropped and his sentence was cut to under nine years last year, but with a further appeal still pending.
European law sets a six-year limit on detention without definitive sentence and Riina’s lawyer Luca Cianferoni said he planned to protest to the European Court of Human Rights.
The National Association of Magistrates’ president, Simone Luerti, said the court that freed Riina had simply applied the law “but in cases like this, it against one’s sense of justice”.
As calls grew for reform to lengthen preventative custody, Luerti said this clashed with the basic right of being presumed innocent. The solution, he said, was faster trials.
Italian media recalled earlier episodes of mafiosi freed on this technicality — 11 convicted murderers from the Calabrian “‘Ndrangheta” freed in 2000 and 30 Cosa Nostra men in 1991.
Vincenzo Carbone, head of the Supreme Judicial Court, says Italy is ranked last in Europe in judicial speed and efficiency and 155th out of 178 in World Bank rankings — clashing with its status as member of the Group of Seven rich industrial nations.
“We spend roughly what other European Union countries do on our courts but theirs perform much better,” he said last month.
Sen. Anna Finocchiaro, running for head of Sicily’s regional government, said Riina’s release “undermines efforts by police, magistrates and Sicilian society to combat organised crime”.
Ordinary Sicilians are increasingly taking a public stand against Cosa Nostra violence, with youngsters urging business to stop paying extortion money to the mob. But Mafia experts fear a leadership vacuum could end the relative “pax mafiosa”.
Toto’s arrest in 1993 ended a brutal reign which saw a turf war and challenge to authority dramatised by the murders in 1992 of anti-Mafia magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.
Mafia experts say the 77-year-old still wields power and his younger son’s release could affect the balance of power in the Cosa Nostra, weakened by the arrest of Riina’s two successors Bernardo Provenzano in 2006 and Salvatore Lo Piccolo last year.
Chief anti-Mafia prosecutor Piero Grasso was consoled by the fact that Riina Junior’s years in jail “almost add up to a full sentence”. But recent victories over the Mafia “risk being undermined by our slow and muddled legal system”.
Italy Blames Slow Justice as Mafia Boss´ Son Walks – Published: February 29, 2008 14:43h – http://www.javno.com/en/world/clanak.php?id=127980
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