Justice, Italian Style

Almost 26 years after Mussolini hung by his heels in a Milan public square, Italy's legal system retains the heavy imprint of II Dace's regime. One-third of the country's penal laws were passed during the Fascist period; because they remain on the books, Italians can still be arrested without warrants, denied bail and jailed for months without formal charges. The legal machinery is so faulty, in fact, that roughly half of all prisoners are released immediately after trial because the government has failed to prove its case or the hapless defendant has already served his sentence before being convicted.

The sorry state of Italian justice has periodically aroused politicians and the press--to no avail. Now the case of an American couple, Carol and William Berger, has stirred a particularly angry outcry that may lead to long overdue reforms of the Italian penal code. This week William Berger is scheduled for trial in Salerno in a drug case that would be ludicrous if it were not so tragic. His wife, arrested in the same case, will never be tried. She died in detention 51 months ago, without ever having been charged.

Spaghetti Westerns. Until disaster hit them last August, the Bergers were among Italy's most fortunate American expatriates. William, now 42, was a handsome actor whose career prospered after he moved from New York to Rome in 1965. As a swaggering bad guy in spaghetti westerns, Berger began to command fees that ran his annual income into six figures. His wife Carol, 39, was an aspiring artist and actress in New York. Last year the Bergers decided to spend a quiet summer in a rented villa overlooking the Amalfi coast. There, Carol developed hepatitis, and during her recuperation they entertained rarely. But on Aug. 5, they invited seven dinner guests, none of them Italian.

While the Bergers and their guests listened to music into the early hours, 200 policemen raided nearby houses in search of narcotics. Reason: the Amalfi coastal area, a popular spot for freewheeling actors and artists, has long been a prime target of suspicious Italian narcs. Armed with a search warrant, 30 of the police crashed the party and spent five hours ransacking the premises. In a snuffbox in an empty room the cops finally found a prize: nine-tenths of one gram of marijuana.

Hustled to the station house, the Bergers and their guests were perfunctorily examined by a local doctor, who pronounced all nine "subject to suspected intoxication by narcotics." Under Italian law, such a preliminary finding must be followed immediately by a thorough medical examination. Claiming there were no local facilities for the examinations, police shuttled the suspects to mental asylums near Naples and held them for 22 days--without charges--until police doctors finally conducted the required medical tests. Fifty days after that, the Bergers' seven guests were released because the test results failed to show any evidence of intoxication by drugs. Instead of apologizing, police ordered the seven to leave the country within 24 hours.

Carol Berger died five days before the test results were announced. She had been taking several injections a day for her illness, but police confiscated her syringes and medicines for possible use in the case against her. After she complained of a mysterious fever, officials transferred her to a Naples public hospital where she underwent surgery for abdominal pains. Doctors found a punctured intestine and diffused peritonitis. Four days after the operation, Mrs. Berger was sent to yet another hospital, where she suffered a relapse and fell into a coma. Her husband, handcuffed, was allowed to see her for the first time in 21 months and found her "lying in a very cold room in only her nightgown and without blankets." After her death two days later, there was no autopsy; Italian law requires none. But U.S. consular officials, who had visited Carol in the hospital, requested the medical records. They indicate that Carol died of bronchial pneumonia leading to a cardiac collapse.

Haunted by Monsters. Despite repeated efforts by U.S. consular officers to reduce delays in the case, Berger was finally charged with a crime--possession of that nine-tenths of a gram of marijuana found in his rented villa--184 days after his arrest. He has insisted throughout his ordeal that he has no idea who owned the tiny supply of pot. He has been held, Berger says, merely because he was the legal tenant of the house in which the stuff was found. If convicted, he could be imprisoned for three years, of which he has already served seven months in detention without bail. Raffaello Versani, the Salerno magistrate who indicted Berger, merely says: "For the law there is no difference between one gram of a drug and 100 kilos."

The progovernment Rome daily II Messaggero has labeled the Berger case "a nightmare haunted by monsters called 'the letter of the law.' " Politicians on all sides have joined in. The case, says a leading conservative parliamentarian, Aldo Bozzi, "is a severe condemnation of Italian laws and procedures; it is a system which can be called barbaric."

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