Giving Voice to Silence: A Study of State Violence in Bolzaneto Prison during the Genoa G8 Summit - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 184

calls for legislative action on the theme of torture, nonviolent training for officers in
the service of public order, and the identification of policemen through the use of
numbers on their uniforms.

10.4 The Juridical Conversation of the Trial and the Legal

Narrative of Courtroom Interaction

A trial can be compared to a stage where the actors involved are summoned by the
law to confront each other and give their own versions of the facts, ranging from
prosecution to defense. A trial represents a framework with its own “grammar” that
makes it possible to produce and compare different stories about events, leading
to validation or falsification and creating a coherent narrative through a rigorous
legal process (Landowsky 1989 ), forcing it to conform to the rules of history. As
regards Bolzaneto, nobody could see what was happening inside. No one except
those directly involved has been able to observe the interaction between police and
the demonstrators. For this, the narratives produced during the trial work take on
a central role compensating for the lack of independent testimonials. In fact, the
simultaneous presence of the parties that characterizes the process of justice allows
a new form of encounter between those who have committed and those who have
suffered the crime for a construction of meaning through the intervention of a third
party (Drew 1985 ).
In a juridical narrative, we can observe an ordered sequence of events that unfold
in temporal and chronological dimensions in such a way that they form a unified
sequence in which there is a beginning, a middle, and an end in order to obtain a
coherent and unified story. Finally, according to Landowsky ( 1989 ), if we analyze
the strategic activity from the point of view of semiotic narrative, we find two types
of relationships: contradiction and negotiation. The purposes of the first relationship,
comprising the strategy of contradiction, are opposite, and the comparison takes
the form of a struggle in which we arrive at an asymmetric outcome. The second
is the trading, whose aim is the balancing of a contract. The problem is certainly
important when the accused are institutional figures. In fact, in our case, we are
faced with a situation of conflict where the representation of the events is generated
in the course of political conflict and is determined by antagonistic relations between
groups of policemen and demonstrators (Zamperini et al. 2012 ). The two groups
related two different and contrasting accounts of the events and portrayed two very
different images of reality. On the one side, policemen described the facts as merely
natural moments of tension and disorder due to the great and unexpected number
of demonstrators and to disorganization. On the other side, demonstrators reported
that deliberate acts of physical and psychological cruelty were perpetrated against
them. In other words, participants arrived at the trial with two highly incompatible
narratives of the events. The noncorrelation between the available evidence on the
two sides is an impediment to determining the nature of the incident. When this