Credibility in Court : Communicative Practices in the Camorra Trials

This study combines analysis of actual talk and power technologies with a reflection on the communicative representation of cultural constructs such as truth and credibility to examine shifting relationships between witnesses and the Justice Department in the trials of the Nuova Camorra Organizzata, an Italian criminal organisation.

The Camorra criminal trials, held in Naples, involved more than a thousand people charged with belonging to a criminal organisation, the Nuova Camorra Organizzata (NCO). In the winter of 1982–3 the NCO suffered the desertion of some of its key men who, once arrested, broke the code of silence (omertà), turned against their former associates, and collaborated with the Justice Department. In the initial set of trials their testimony was found sufficiently reliable and convincing to determine the convictions of more than 800 defendants, but in the appeal their credibility was destroyed and the majority of people convicted solely on these witnesses' testimony were acquitted. This study documents the shifting relationship between these witnesses - called pentiti - and the Justice Department. To investigate this dramatic reversal of the defendants' convictions Marco Jacquemet combines analysis of talk and power technologies with a reflection on truth and credibility as communicative representations.