Trial by (social) media: Anglo-Saxon and Italian practises in the digital age

The United States, Britain and Italy have, in principle, the same criminal procedure model, the adversarial system. One of its central ideas is that a fair trial requires the complete ‘cognitive virginity’ of the persons passing judgment on facts relating to the crime. In the digital era new media, social networks and extensive external sources of information pose a fundamental threat to this assumption of cognitive virginity, and ‘trial by media’ may impinge on what goes on in court. In the British system, and to a lesser degree, in America, this is a matter of major concern. In the Italian system, however, though the phenomenon of trial by media is extremely frequent, there are no similar provisions to guarantee impartiality. From the viewpoint of Critical Discourse Analysis (Wodak 2001) and discourse pragmatics, this paper presents a study of the recent case involving the black American icon Bill Cosby, convicted of sexual offences. It argues that the widespread national discussion on all forms of media may not be the fairest way to conduct trials and that the Italian legal system should consider adopting the same kind of measures as found in the Anglo-Saxon context.