Justice referendum: voting Yes is a moral duty: for Enzo Tortora, for Falcone, for all of us.

There is a name that should stand out, more than any slogan, more than any poster face, more than any rally, in this referendum battle for the separation of careers: Enzo tortoraOn March 22 and 23, 2026, Italians will vote on a constitutional reform that will restructure the judiciary, separating the careers of judges and public prosecutors.

And then we need to say it clearly: Voting Yes does not mean being against justiceOn the contrary, it means wanting to restore credibility to justice. It means acknowledging that the system, as it stands, has over time produced errors, distortions, imbalances, and civil tragedies. And that of all these tragedies, that of Tortora remains the most symbolic, the most ferocious, the most intolerable.

The story is well-known, but it needs to be retold ad nauseam, because this country has a bad habit of forgetting. Enzo Tortora was arrested in 1983 on charges that later proved unfounded; after prison, house arrest, a first-instance conviction, and an acquittal on appeal, he was finally acquitted in 1987. Even Rai Teche recalls that story as one of the most sensational cases of Italian miscarriage of justice.

Today that wound comes back before everyone's eyes thanks to "Portobello", the series by Marco Bellocchio released on HBO Max on February 20, 2026, with Fabrizio Gifuni as the host. Bellocchio has clearly stated that the series wasn't intended as a referendum message. And it's right to respect his position. But precisely because it's not propaganda, precisely because it wasn't intended as an ad, the series is even more striking: because it shows, without discounts, the abyss into which a state can fall when it stops doubting itself.

The more you look Portobello, the more you reread the documents, the more you listen to the interviews from that time, the more one thing becomes evident: the Tortora case was not just a mistakeIt was the vivid manifestation of a culture of judicial power that, when it loses its sense of limits, overwhelms the individual and then struggles even to apologize. And if that incident still rankles with us today, it's because it wasn't confined to the past. It became a paradigm.

Some say: but the separation of careers alone isn't enough to prevent a new Tortora case. True. But this isn't an argument against the Yes vote. It's an argument. in favor Yes. Because even if a reform doesn't solve everything, it's still useless. If it helps rebalance the system, strengthen the judge's impartiality, and create a clearer distance between accusers and judges, then it's a step forward.

And we cannot pretend that this issue had not also been grasped by Giovanni FalconeWithout turning it into an election campaign poster, it remains a fact that Falcone, in a famous interview in 1991, said very clearly that judges and public prosecutors should be “two figures structurally differentiated in terms of skills and career”This is no small nuance. It is proof that one of the greatest servants of the State had seen the problem for what it was: the impartiality of the judge cannot simply be proclaimed, it must also be perceived, organized, made credible in the eyes of citizens.Here are Giovanni Falcone's words on the separation of careers at the Luigi Einaudi Foundation.)

The political point, then, is simple. Whoever defends the No defends the status quo. It defends a system that has already revealed gigantic cracks. It defends the idea that there is nothing substantial to correct. It defends, ultimately, that gray area where citizens enter the judicial meat grinder and discover too late that being right is not enough, being innocent is not enough, even being acquitted is not enough to get one's life back.

And there's another aspect that still cries out for vengeance today. Because it's not enough to remember what justice did to Tortora; we must also remember how that same justice, in the following years, was not able to truly kneel before the damage causedFrom the available public sources, only one real request for apology emerges from a magistrate involved, that of Diego Marmo, which arrived in 2014, thirty years later, and was accompanied by a plea to their "good faith." For the rest, the journalistic reconstructions of reference do not reveal a true collective assumption of responsibility by the other magistrates involved; indeed, already in 2013 Republic he underlined how, on that front, the void was almost total.

And this is perhaps the most scandalous fact. Not only was an innocent man overwhelmed, humiliated, destroyed. But those who overwhelmed it, with very rare exceptions, never really found the courage to fully measure the harm done.As if the suffering of an innocent person were a footnote. As if a devastated life could be archived within the comfortable confines of procedure, formality, and good faith invoked retrospectively. It is this inability to comprehend the human, moral, and civil damage inflicted on innocents that makes reform even more urgent.

For this reason the Yes committee would do well to put Enzo tortora at the center of its public narrative. Not to exploit him. Not to twist a personal tragedy into partisan use. But to remind Italy that behind every legal formula lie people, families, reputations, bodies, illnesses, and shattered lives. Tortora is not a saint: he is an open wound in the Republic.

And then yes, we must have the courage to say it: Voting Yes is also an act of respect towards the memory of Enzo TortoraBecause the worst way to honor him would be to commemorate him on TV, applaud the drama, be outraged for a few nights, and then leave intact the mechanism that made that horror possible. Memory, if it doesn't become a choice, is nothing but hypocrisy.

Even if this reform were to help reduce the risk of one miscarriage of justice, of one broken life, of one An innocent man dragged through the mud, then it would already be worth supporting. Because a serious government doesn't wait for yet another Tortora to understand that something needs to change. It understands it first. And it acts.

On March 22nd and 23rd, therefore, the issue isn't whether the reform is perfect. The issue is whether we want to continue pretending nothing has happened. Anyone who saw Tortora, who understood Tortora, who knows that even Falcone had grasped the need for a clearer distinction between accusation and judgment, who still sees today the inability of justice to truly ask forgiveness from the innocent people it has overwhelmed, can only vote Yes.