“There is an insurmountable objection… how can you premeditate a murder in your own home?”. Or “the interpretative rule of evidence should always be the one most favorable to the accused, but we have always seen the opposite in this story”. Or again “we are faced with a split hypothesis of self-defense at home”. Or “we bordered on illogicality in the contested sentence”.
The lawyer Carlo Taormina went on for over three hours yesterday morning to convince judges and jurors of the assize court of appeal presided over by Carmelo Blatti of his theories: Claudio Costantino, his client, on 1 January 2022 had not at all planned the killing of Giovanni Portugal and Giuseppe Cannavò, but was instead confronted in the house by the two who were armed and defended himself by “shooting wildly”. He does not deserve a life sentence as the accusation continues to repeat even in the second degree, as the deputy general prosecutor Giuseppe Costa did at the last hearing on the day of the indictment, but he must certainly be sentenced to a much lower sentence.
The deadline for discussion in the appeal process is in fact a twenty-year sentence imposed at first instance with the exclusion of the aggravating circumstances of premeditation and abject and frivolous motives. However, he has always contested the accusation, and for this reason the prosecutor has appealed.
On the day of the defense at the trial for the double murder of Camaro San Luigi, prof. Taormina together with his defense colleague, the lawyer Filippo Pagano, tried to dismantle the prosecution’s reconstruction piece by piece, because «… reality cannot be distorted with illogical and inconclusive interpretations which have often occurred in this trial».
Lawyer Pagano also spoke at length yesterday in the courtroom on the first floor of the Palace of Justice: he started around 1.30pm after his colleague had finished, and he finished when it was just after four in the afternoon.
According to prof. Taormina it is precisely the dynamics of the facts and the ballistic findings that speak clearly of what happened in that house in via Morabito, in Camaro San Luigi, on 1 January 2022. And the findings “speak” for themselves, he explained. The bullet casings found inside the house are proof that what Costantino said (“they attacked me in the house, they were armed”), is true (“there is only one thing that is certain, that those four bullet casings were fired inside the house, the sentence instead reasons differently”, “the four bullet casings… that is not an initial action but a counteraction”).
Then there are the so-called “blood stains” inside and not outside the house, there is for example a circular blood stain, therefore caused by the perpendicular fall of the blood, which inevitably must belong to Cannavò (“this blood is attributed mainly to Cannavò”, “I Costantino was inside the house when I fired those shots”).
Another aspect. Some time before, Costantino was kneecaped. According to prof. Taormina «it is reasonable to believe that Cannavò and Portugal were behind this knee-jerk», who then wanted to carry out their murderous plan that afternoon at Costantino’s house (“… these gentlemen went there to kill… there were many attempts to kill Costantino by Cannavò and Portugal… they went five times that day to surprise him, the sixth was the fatal one”).
The lawyer Pagano also concentrated on a key passage always highlighted by the defenders (“the wiretaps support the defense reconstruction”). That is, «that it was the victims themselves who wanted to meet Costantino – probably to insist on the request for money rejected in the previous days – and not vice versa. The lack of any direct mention of a summons by the accused in the messages in question (some messages subsequently extrapolated from mobile phones, ed.) is a significant silence: it confirms that the idea of the meeting was already in the intentions of Cannavò and Portugal, so much so that they talk about it among themselves, while there is no trace of an explicit invitation coming from Costantino”.
«Ultimately – the lawyer Pagano then stated -, the prosecutor’s appeal does not indicate any recognizable error in the arguments of the first judges: the latter weighed all the elements (declarative, technical, circumstantial) and drew logical and legally correct conclusions. On the contrary, the accusatory system in the appeal appears to have been constructed “after the fact”, forcing the procedural data to make them fall within the framework of premeditation at all costs”.