History of violence

 Out of the past. Misprision of a felony. Take him down

Ginzburg’s one departure from the essay form has been The Judge and the Historian, a passionate defence of his friend Adriano Sofri, convicted of ordering the assassination in 1972, when he was a leader of the revolutionary group Lotta Continua, of an Italian policeman, Luigi Calabresi, under whose charge the anarchist Pino Pinelli had died, and was widely thought to have been murdered. Ginzburg’s book demolished the case for the prosecution. To no avail: Sofri was sentenced to 22 years’ imprisonment, from which he has only just emerged. Commenting on the relationship between the judge and the historian, here and elsewhere, Ginzburg has remarked that the principal differences between them are two: judges hand down sentences, and on individuals only, whereas historians deal with groups or institutions too, without penal authority over them. Marc Bloch, in the spirit of the Annales, had rejected the intrusion of judicial models into history, as encouraging not only concern with famous persons rather than collective structures, but moralising treatments of them. For Ginzburg these are sound objections. But he insists they should not obscure a crucial imperative uniting the judge and the historian: the commitment of each to the idea of proof.

The argument is impressive, but it overlooks a critical difference, brought home starkly by Ginzburg’s study of Sofri’s trial itself. His destruction of the case against Sofri and his co-defendants was a disproof: that is, a negative demonstration that the evidence against them did not stand up. That evidence essentially came down to the testimony of another former member of Lotta Continua, Leonardo Marino, that he had been the driver of the car used in the assassination of Calabresi 15 years earlier, acting on orders of the group, and repented of his role in the killing. By then – 1990 – Marino had a record of petty crime, and his testimony was, as Ginzburg showed, riddled with contradictions. For a verdict in the trial, this was all that was required. Legally, judges are obliged to acquit an accused if the evidence against them is faulty or insufficient. But for historians, matters will be quite otherwise. For them, the obvious questions in a case like this must be: why did Marino bring false witness against his former comrades 15 years after the assassination, and if they were not its authors, who was? In other words, the historical task to hand would be the most plausible reconstruction, on the basis of what evidence has survived, of what actually happened in 1972, as distinct from the judicial task, in this case, of registering what could not have happened. Ginzburg expressly disavows any attempt at that. For the purpose at hand, to save a friend from an unjust sentence, he did all that was necessary. All that was necessary for a lawyer; not for a historian. 

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v34/n08/perry-anderson/the-force-of-the-anomaly