Calabrian by birth, but Roman by adoption, a magistrate for 30 years, with a stint as a parliamentarian for the DS and the Greens for seven years, and a lawyer for the rest of his life. Luigi Saraceni, who died today at the age of 87, was president of the court section in Rome, among the founders of the Democratic Magistracy, in the defense panel of Abdullah Ocalan, leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), in the period in which he was detained in Italy. But he was also a father-lawyer: with Francesco Misiani and Franco Coppi he defended his daughter Federica Saraceni, arrested in 2003 in the investigation into the New Red Brigades and then convicted in the trial for the murder of labor law expert Massimo D’ in 1999 in Rome Antona.
Luigi Saraceni, a story of Italy told in three lives
Giancarlo de Cataldo
10 February 2019
In the book published in 2019 “A century or little more”, dedicated to the history of his family, Luigi Saraceni told of his father Silvio and above all of his daughter’s ‘painful’ story. On the occasion of the presentation of the volume in Milan, the former mayor, also in the pool of lawyers of the Kurdish leader Ocalan, said: “If there was a fixed point in Saraceni’s career it was guaranteeism. In his life he was a magistrate, judge, public prosecutor, lawyer, parliamentarian and has never changed his mind on the presumption of innocence.”
And it is no coincidence that Saraceni was among the founders of the Antigone association, which – as recalled by Mauro Palma, president of the European Penological Center and former National Guarantor of persons deprived of liberty – “fights for rights in prisons, which has always had not only among its teachers but also among its active protagonists”. Furthermore, as a deputy of the Democrats of the Left, he signed the “Simeone-Saraceni” law in 1998, together with Alberto Simeone, deputy of the National Alliance, which made the granting of alternative measures to prison detention broader and easier in the event of conviction. equal to or less than three years of detention, in the belief that staying in prison is useful for certain types of prisoners, useless and perhaps harmful for others. The bill, which had been approved by a large majority in parliament, was then harshly attacked by AN who had voted for it in parliament, as it was considered jointly responsible for the increase in common crimes. Saraceni also appealed to the Constitutional Court against the Fini-Giovanardi law “because heavy criminal measures on drugs had been included in a decree that dealt with something completely different – explains Palma again”. Senator Cecilia D’Elia Riviello broke the news of his death.
