I’m continuing to publish some questions and answers from the book "Intervista su Tangentopoli" published by Laterza and edited by Giovanni Valentini.

GV: However, it’s a fact that corruption continues and that Tangentopoli is not finished. What’s the moral that we can see there?
ADP: Good. That’s true. It means that the justice system has failed but that’s not the failure of the Clean Hands project.
And the justice system has failed not really because the magistrates have arrested innocent people but above all because of this political class. I don’t want to hide the fact that even among the magistrates, as among any group of people there are idol ones and visionaries. The political class embodies the interests of private individuals, those of the trial and those that are personal to members of the Pole as well as the political interests of social normalisation that is headed up by the Centre Left.
In recent years, all the energies have been focused on making legislation that favours the defendants rather than towards identifying the best tools that can be used in trials to ascertain the truth.
In parallel with the creation of rules about the rights of defence for the defendant, there should have been work on improving the way a trial can be concluded by reducing the degrees of judgement and making it a norm that alternative rites can be applied. The judicial offices should have been given the means, the tools and the trial reforms so that the truth can be reached rather than impunity. There should have been new norms dealing with crimes against the public administration and about the phenomenon of corruption. Above all the certainty of punishment should have been made effective so that those who misbehave know that they will finish up in prison and will stay there. In a prison that is more human and more decent, yes, but still a prison for those whom crime is the meaning of life.
These and many others should have been the objectives and the actions that the Centre Left government should have set out to achieve as soon as they were installed in Palazzo Chigi. They should have done that rather than chasing after the continual requests and unsustainable compromises of the current Berlusconian.

GV: But is it not true, senator Di Pietro, that you had too much faith in the “judicial way” to the Second Republic and that today we are paying the consequences?
ADP: Ah yes. We’ll see that the fault is not of the one who committed the crimes but of the one who discovered them. We need to get a full understanding on this point. We didn’t carry out our investigation to arrive at a Second Republic using the judicial way.
The Second Republic could have been the consequence resulting from the verification of the facts about the crimes committed by the protagonists of the First Republic. Let’s not mix up cause and effect.
The presupposition of the investigations was the verification of who was guilty before the law. The result is that the new political class, instead of taking on the need to celebrate the trials, they got busy approving norms to ensure the impunity of those who should have been tried.