“Brenner” trial appeal sentence
On March 17, the appeal verdict in the trial for the May 2016 anti-borders demonstration at the Brenner Pass was handed down at the Bolzano court.
While there was a general lowering of the sentences (from 150 to 123 years total, with 8 acquittals due to the statute of limitations of the crime), the balance is still heavy (keep in mind that the trial was in abbreviated form). 28 female comrades and comrades received sentences above 2 years, while 5 comrades took more than 4 years (the highest sentence was 5 years and 1 month in prison) for conspiracy to commit aggravated resistance, private violence, injury, etc. The charge of devastation and looting did not hold up, as it did in the first instance.
Another significant element is that the judge denied all and sundry who applied for it access to the so-called Cartabia reform. Although the sentencing date had been formally postponed to allow defendants and defendants to make use of the new law, the request to access it was denied under the pretext of the criminal records and “social dangerousness” of defendants and defendants. But there is an even more emblematic fact: the main argument for the rejection of “substitute sentences” has been the defendants’ failure to abjure their conduct. The increasingly overtly rewarding nature of sentencing applies not only to the supervisory judiciary, but also to ordinary courts. What makes the difference on the type of sentence is not so much the offense itself, but whether or not the defendant “repents.”
For more than 30 defendants and defendants, therefore, prison doors may open in the future.
This ruling only prolongs the structural violence of state racism, that set of laws, neocolonial practices, administrative detention and police devices that produce massacres, mass deaths and a humanity forced into conditions of semi-slavery. From the harvesting in the fields to the many sectors of the “informal economy,” from the blackmail of the residence permit – which weighs on logistics, construction, catering, “care work”… – to the fat black rental market, the terror exercised by the borders is as strategic as it is unmentionable part of capitalist exploitation.
123 years in prison for a motorcade blatantly tells us that we are at war, that the margins of permissible dissent are shrinking, and that non-negotiated conflict is a desertion from the frontline to be punished in an exemplary fashion.
The anti-immigrant wall at the Brenner Pass-which the Austrian police had called a mere “technical solution” …-was not built. Perhaps also thanks to those who fought with generosity and courage that May 7, 2016.
Solidarity with the convicted comrades and comrades.
[Taken from https://ilrovescio.info/2023/03/19/sentenza-dappello-del-processo-brennero/]
Via: La Nemesi
