Trial Narratives and Truth. From a Political Tragedy to a Farcical Verdict. The Podlech Case

How can it be possible that the law stays powerless after political violence? How can it be possible that a nation looks at the future without sealing the wounds of victims and coming to terms with its past? However, the expression transitional justice is often only a euphemism; when dealing with crimes that involve whole communities, the law experiences great difficulty, if not inability, to face and explain the immensely complex issue of justice. Furthermore, the judicial process of the past shows its various limitations, due to the tragic nature of such political crimes. In this contribution through an ethnographic observation of the trial procedures, is analyzed the role of mnemonic narrations in the reconstruction of truth in a specific criminal trial highlighting the divide of the judicial reality, the epistemological dichotomy between the victim’s and the executioner’s narrations and, finally, the gap between historical and judicial truth, represented by the operative part of the judgment.