Mr. Cassiani Lawyer

Every time we meet I start with the same words, but I have them in my heart and so I need to say them to you.  I thank Anna not only because she has organized another important meeting on another important subject, but also because her gatherings that are addressed to a category of runners, a category of people with little time, allow us to rest.  It is a beneficial pause, both for the soul, for the spirit and for the brain.  I don’t know you, but this morning I have already done a thousand things.  I arrived here exhausted; but now I find myself in a sort of an island, as if in an oasis, among friends, in a quiet environment, and I find myself speaking on a topic that interests and fascinates me.  The Truth.  After having discussions with judges, speaking with clients on important but very material, practical things, the Truth.  Therefore, we are on a higher level. We – well, I do, but I suppose you do too – we already feel that our feet are detached from the floor and this is so also because we shall soon be listening to two great speakers: a great priest and a man that I have got to know today through Anna’s words, a person with a certain charisma and a very successful past…

The Truth. This morning I recited with you the last verse of the prayer that seems to be indicative and introductive.  It says, ‘and…that we may… never grow apart from the truth’.  This is an apparently simple engagement, but which Christian can call himself or herself so if he or she grows apart from the Truth and does not follow it even at the risk of making sacrifices, even at the risk of …I don’t say of giving up one’s own life…but still, of fighting in order to assert it…?

The absolute Truth is our engagement, it must be our aim in exercising our profession; if the father wants to enlighten us later on, he can deal with this issue that sometimes for us becomes a problem of conscience, a problem that seizes us and gives us sleepless nights because on the one hand we have the defense of the client – I am speaking as far as criminal law is concerned, but I believe that this problem concerns civil law too – and on the other hand we have the truth of the trial; in the middle maybe we can see sometimes the true Truth.

Luckily this occurs rarely because we usually ‘espouse’ the cases, meaning we believe the client, we think that that is the truth and then we deduct that that truth risks of being tampered with or even not known by the judge.  So it becomes a battle that has a moral aspect, a battle not only in defense of the client but also of his freedom and thus of his truth.  How many times have we suffered of heart palpitations just at the idea that that client in whom we had believed could be condemned to life imprisonment –  I say this to exaggerate – but this has happened a lot of times to me.  I have seen lawyers cry in front of the acquittal, lawyers cry in front of a condemnation which they didn’t consider right or that they thought it was a patent, a very serious judiciary mistake. We are tormented.  If there is a category that when speaking of Truth is speaking of its daily drama, and I start from the idea that the lawyer does his own job out of passion and out of a conscience besides, of course, out of a basic need of survival.

I am saying this in bracket, but how many times do we fight with the same enthusiasm, with the same dedication also to defend poor clients, clients who have no economic possibilities? And sometimes the dedication is even bigger, isn’t it Antonio?  How many times do we feel like paladins just because we defend the client that from a practical, economic point of view would have no chance but who, to us, does not represent a display of vanity, but a battle that needs to be fought?  This is a theme I could go on for hours because I am talking of our life, of our experience.

And I am going to stop here because I am not a speaker today, I am just here to greet, to express my grateful and devout greeting to the speakers; but I am here among you also to hear how a Catholic, a believer, a Christian, a man engaged in a battle of faith,  must behave when he practices his profession….and needs to make some hard choices.  Also because not defending properly one’s own client is a moral problem, isn’t it?  It is not just a deontological problem, but also a moral one not to do one’s own duty in defense of a battle that has freely been accepted, and that sometimes it is a battle for life or death – I am talking here both about penal and civil cases. You can come out of these battles either shattered and with broken bones or with a chance of going forth reconstructing one’s own life.  These are the issues I think that are going to be dealt with by our speakers today.

Let’s thank Anna before the others because she has given us the chance – I think I am expressing everybody’s opinion – to meditate once in a while on this life of ours, this life that is made up of technical, juridical problems but above all of moral problems. I thank you all.