The former undersecretary for Justice, Andrea Delmastro, "aware of the publicity of the assembly proceedings, did not hesitate to report to the deputy Donzelli the secret information that he had obtained with such insistence from the head of the Dap in view of the discussion that the latter was about to have in Parliament, evidently believing that the political purpose of the use of that information was prevalent (and this regardless of the fact that the accused knew that Donzelli had the intention of using it to harm his party opponents) and trusting that Donzelli would bring them back to the Chamber in a generic way (which in fact he did)". This is what the judges of the Third Court of Appeal of Rome wrote in the reasons with which on May 20th they confirmed the 8-month sentence for the Fdi exponent for the accusation of revealing official secrecy in the case of the anarchist Alfredo Cospito.
"Nor, contrary to what is claimed by the defense - we read in the 26-page document filed in August -, the circumstance that the information was provided to Donzelli in Transatlantic and therefore as a function of his speech in the Chamber in itself demonstrates the good faith of the accused". For Delmastro, the prosecutor had requested, as happened in the first instance, acquittal, requesting the formula "because the fact does not constitute a crime". In the reasons, the judges of second instance also write that "contrary to what is claimed by the defense ("Delmastro is not a public employee, but a political decision-maker") the minister and the delegated undersecretary - the judges continue - were part of the administrative procedure and therefore obliged to respect the official secrecy imposed on the documents preliminary to the evaluation of the Minister pursuant to art. 41bis, which cannot be disclosed to subjects unrelated to the procedure and not even to the interested party".
For the Appeal, furthermore, "having ascertained the secret nature of the information provided by Delmastro to Donzelli, it must therefore be stated that the accused's conduct integrates the details of the contested crime because the undersecretary, acting by virtue of the specific delegation conferred on him for the affairs falling within the competence of the Department of Penitentiary Administration and, in particular, on the Penitentiary Police, revealed information regarding acts and facts functionally connected to the institutional activity of his office which had to remain secret and of which he was recipient/custodian, disclosing them to anyone who had no right to receive them". The judges also state that "it is unlikely that, after an absolutely generic telephone conversation, meeting Donzelli by chance and in view of the speech in the Chamber that he was about to make, Delmastro was able to reel off from memory the contents of the Nic document precisely in the part that interested Donzelli".
And again: "it therefore emerges that the accused revealed to Donzelli the exact information noted by the Nic regarding the conversations captured between Cospito and the two prisoners, as can also be deduced from the express reference that the deputy made, in his speech, to specific documents ("as can be seen from the documents that are present at the Ministry of Justice") and from the textual coincidence of the sentences used by him with those noted by the Nic ("you must maintain the trend" "They are not moving outside only the anarchists, but also other associations. Now let's see what happens in Rome" "it would be important for the issue to reach a European level and maybe they would remove the life sentence"".
Finally, the judges state that "in the case in question, the deputy Donzelli who received the information was completely foreign to the Administration and in particular to that part of it responsible for managing the procedures pursuant to art. 41-bis and, contrary to what was claimed by the defence, he was not entitled to receive it even in the context of an inspection".
