The main accusation is dropped and the Court of Appeal of Reggio Calabria acquitted the former senator Antonio Caridi and the lawyer and former parliamentarian Paolo Romeo. Among those acquitted are Don Pino Strangio, former rector of the Polsi Sanctuary. Alberto Sarra, former undersecretary of the Calabria Region who died a few weeks ago, was also acquitted. Numerous acquittals in the appeal process with the ordinary Gotha procedure, which saw a group of representatives of institutions, politicians and professions accused of being close to the ndrangheta of Reggio Calabria.
Caridi’s lawyers
The lawyers Valerio Spigarelli and Carlo Morace, defenders of Antonio Caridi, former senator of the Republic, express their deepest satisfaction with the sentence issued today by the Court of Appeal of Reggio Calabria which confirmed the acquittal already pronounced by the Court of the same city in the so-called Gotha trial.
By rejecting the appeal that had been presented by the Public Prosecutor’s Office, the Court once again confirmed that the accusations against Antonio Caridi, which led to his arrest and long precautionary detention, are and have always been completely baseless.
The bitter consideration remains that the life of a parliamentarian of the Republic, even before the injustice of the charges leveled against him, and the equally unjust precautionary detention he suffered for over two years, was once sacrificed to the divinities of judicial populism by his own parliamentary colleagues who, without even having the material time to read the trial papers, authorized his arrest.
Today’s sentence, which also definitively undermines the accusatory system underlying the so-called Gotha trial, restores to Caridi and his family the honor that was unjustly questioned, but it certainly does not erase the pain and human suffering, nor does it wash away the stain that this affair has left on the country’s parliamentary history.