Sofri pardon

It seems “nearly certain”:http://www.repubblica.it/2005/l/sezioni/cronaca/sofri5/mastella-grazia/mastella-grazia.html that the Italian government is going to pardon Adriano Sofri. This has been a continuing sore on the Italian legal system – to all appearances, Sofri was stitched up for a murder he didn’t commit. It’s a slightly involved story (Carlo Ginzburg’s book, “The Judge and the Historians”:http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/radical_history_review/v080/80.1reid.html, gives a good account). Sofri was one of the founders of _Lotta Continua_, an autonomist Marxist group which bitterly denounced an Italian policeman, Luigi Calabresi, as a symbol of all that was rotten and corrupt in the Italian state (an anarchist railway worker, Pino Pinelli, had mysteriously taken it upon himself to jump to his death from Calabresi’s office window while under interrogation – the subject of Dario Fo’s play _The Accidental Death of an Anarchist_). Some years after Calabresi himself was murdered, presumably by leftists, a former _Lotta Continua_ supporter came to the police and claimed that Sofri and others had ordered the killing. Despite the weakness of this evidence (the witness appears to have been highly unreliable), Sofri and two others were convicted of murder. This has been a _cause celebre_ for the Italian left ever since. There’s no real evidence that Sofri was guilty of anything more than overheated and rather unpleasant rhetoric, for which he has since apologized – it’s good to see that this miscarriage of justice is about to be righted.