Hi Family,

Our court case is coming up next month on February 20th. That's about 7 weeks/48 days away.

Judge Adele Pezone will be reviewing our documents on our court date, alongside Avv. Di Rugiero's legal reasoning arguing for our citizenship, and potentially (but probably not) alongside a set of documents from the Italian Ministry of the Interior. If we are lucky, we could hear as soon as the 20th about her verdict in our case. More likely, we will get our verdict later in the week, probably on Friday 2/24. As soon as I hear, either from the app or from our lawyer, I will send you all an email.

The verdict we get will determine what happens next.

(Quick summary version: if we win, it will be a few months to a year until we are registered and can move on to getting passports and registering minor children. If we don’t win, we would need to appeal to continue moving forward. I’m inclined to appeal. That adds time and cost, but it’s very likely we would win on appeal. If we won on appeal, there would still be a wait between winning and getting passports.)

Longer version:

Hopefully we will get a positive ruling, and Judge Pezone will agree that we should be recognized as Italian citizens. If this is the case, there will be an appeal period in case the Ministry of the Interior wishes to appeal the verdict. This, as far as I can tell, never happens. They usually don't even send any paperwork for cases like these. Once the appeal period is over, the court will issue an official ruling, and our lawyer will send that and all of our translated vital records down to Ceprano.

From there, Ceprano will take the time that it takes to register all of our records. Some comuni take days or weeks to accomplish this, while others take months. I have not been able to speak with anyone who knows how Ceprano operates when it comes to logging these records. Ceprano was quite responsive when we needed to get copies of Arduino and Filomena's birth and marriage records, so I am hopeful they will be quick about this piece too. I’ll be reaching out to the Comune di Ceprano and our lawyer to check in on this process, and I’ll keep you up to date on it. 

Once we can get copies of our Italian vital records (especially our birth certificates), we will be able to move forward on registering with our local consulate. (Kaitlyn and Kasandra, you will register with the Los Angeles Consulate; everyone else, you will register with San Francisco.) Once we are registered with our consulates, we can make plans to get passports. While we need to register with the Consulates General in San Francisco and LA, there are Honorary Consulates in Helena, Portland, San Diego, and Las Vegas where we can make appointments to get passports, so there won’t be a need to catch a flight to get one! I’ll help everyone with this piece of the puzzle when the time comes.

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Now, I should discuss the other possibility: a negative verdict. It’s possible that Judge Pezone will decide that she does not think we should be recognized as Italian citizens. She does have a track record of deciding cases like ours this way. Because Grandma Florence was a minor (only 6 years old) at the time that Grandpa Arduino became a US citizen, some judges think that she lost her Italian citizenship. The Ministry of the Interior has clarified that they think this is a bad read of the law. Additionally, each time a case that has been decided this way has been appealed, the plaintiffs have won their appeal. This includes at least one decision by Judge Pezone being overturned. Unfortunately, precedent does not work in the same way in Italian courts that it does in US courts, and judges have lots of autonomy. Some judges continue to issue negative verdicts in cases like ours. Of course, I am hopeful that Judge Pezone has changed her mind in light of her overturned verdicts, but it is possible that she will still issue a negative verdict.

If we get a negative verdict, I think we should appeal. As I shared, I have only heard of victories on appeal in cases like ours. It would add time and expense to this process. And we are either all in or all out — if we don’t appeal on this exact case with this exact set of family members, we would need to file a new case and start from scratch. This is not meant to guilt or pressure anyone; it’s simply a fact about how these cases work. We will also have a limited timeline of 30 days to decide. Avv. Di Ruggiero will not say how much he would charge for our appeal, and he says that the cost would depend on the legal reasoning in the decision from Judge Pezone. Seems fair to me, but also a very lawyerly answer...

Avv. Di Ruggiero says that it will take 1-2 years to go through the appeal process. From there, we would simply go through the process outlined above after a positive ruling. The positive ruling would just come later.

Please let me know what questions you have about this.

My plan is radio silence until we have a verdict in February, but message me with anything about this process that is on your mind. And be thinking about what you would want to do in the case of a negative ruling -- appeal or not?

Happy New Year!

Noah