This is a completely personal reflection on justice. Today in Italy (I don’t know what happens in most Western countries and in other parts of the world—perhaps the same), at the end of a criminal trial there are only two possible outcomes: the defendant is declared either “guilty” or “innocent.”
But it wasn’t always this way. At least in Italy, until the 1960s, there were three possible verdicts: “guilty,” “innocent,” and “innocent due to insufficient evidence.” The last type of judgment would let the defendant go free, but implied a sort of moral condemnation. Its meaning was: there are reasons to believe you’re guilty, but lacking absolute certainty of your guilt, you are acquitted.
In reality, this last condition still applies today in many cases where the defendant is declared innocent: guilt should, at least on paper, be determined only when there is irrefutable evidence of the defendant’s guilt, while in the presence of reasonable doubt, the defendant should be declared innocent. This is to avoid glaring judicial errors, according to the principle that it is better to have a guilty person at large than an innocent one in prison.
However, the possibility of only two types of verdicts can lead to paradoxical outcomes: sometimes, in the presence of significant but not decisive circumstantial evidence, the defendant is convicted; other times, even when there is evidence suggesting guilt, the defendant is acquitted. The option of “acquittal due to insufficient evidence” is a middle ground that could be easily applied when there are serious indications of guilt, but also significant doubts.
What would be the advantage of a three-verdict system? That in debatable cases—those that often divide public opinion between those who believe in guilt and those who believe in innocence—the defendant could still be acquitted, but with a mark that prevents them from claiming to be a victim of a judicial error. On the contrary, the truly innocent would receive a full acquittal, a real certification that they did not commit the crime they were accused of. And this would probably avoid the paradoxical situation of defendants convicted at first instance and then acquitted on appeal, or vice versa—people who later cry out about judicial error. All this could also have an impact on possible compensation by the State in cases of judicial errors.
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