STATEMENT AT SANTE NOTARNICOLA'S SENTENCING HEARING

"I will always be, and this time in the best, more correct and more difficult way, a communist, a revolutionary... I am not here to ask for leniency, I have come here before you, but not for the reasons that a common prisoner presents himself in court: to defend himself legally to lighten the penalty. I am here to criticize my past where it should be criticized, in a revolutionary way, from a revolutionary point of view."

"I turn to all who were exploited as I was, as I am: only with respect to the values that they represent can my past be criticized and condemned. If I robbed banks, if some men died against my will and not at my hands, I certainly do not have to justify myself to a society founded on robbery, fraud and violence. I made a mistake, it's undeniable. Just as I feel remorse for the dead, unknowing victims of a continuous and unstoppable struggle which we insignificant exploited men certainly did not ask for. It is up to my class, the proletariat, the exploited masses, to judge me, and it is them that I ask to understand that we wanted our action to be an answer - instead it was only a reaction - to a situation intolerable to human dignity, and that is the bourgeois system that is responsible for all this, the cause of every violence and injustice, the provoker of crime."

"I have rebelled against this state of things from the age of 14. At a certain moment in my life I expressed this rebellion in an absolutely mistaken way, when I decided to become a bandit: I confused the revolutionary struggle with individual rebellion, playing the game of the ruling class in this way... others better than me will follow, well-taught by my errors, to grasp the positive side of our experience. The struggle against you will continue, inside and outside the jails... All the common criminals, the lost, the rebels without hope, we will return them to you with a revolutionary consciousness. It has been and will be our task, as the vanguard inside the jails, to turn the prisons into schools of communism and replace opportunism with an always greater spirit of brotherhood and solidarity. This is my commitment and this is your error. You think you have won and instead, even with me, you have already lost the battle."

Sante Notarnicola