The senator of Fratelli d’Italia speaks of a “shivering sentence” Cynthia Pellegrinonational coordinator of the Department for the Protection of Victims for Giorgia Meloni’s party. «It gives you the shivers to hear verdicts like the one from the Court of Cassation on the murder of Lorena Quarantawhich overturned the life sentence of Antonio De Pace, because he acted under stress from the lockdown and Covid. Appealing to the risk that forced cohabitation could exacerbate and degenerate conflicts in relationships is, at the very least, laughable. Strangling one’s partner and then attempting to take one’s own life by cutting one’s wrists falls within the classic murder-attempted suicide pattern of dysfunctional couples and therefore cannot be considered accidental. Not to mention that a sentence that lowers criminal liability because the defendant was unable to combat the state of anguish he was gripped by serves as a lesson for other cases that may be considered similar. The work of the ermines leaves us with a lot of bitterness. This is not how you bring justice to the victims.
And she says she is “incredulous about this sentence” Cecilia D’Eliasenator of the Democratic Party and vice president of the bicameral commission on femicide: «While the UN promptly raised the alarm about the increase in male violence against women, especially domestic violence, caused during the Covid period by the lockdown, in the sentence of the case relating to the murder of Lorena Quaranta, the reasons for which we will read carefully, Covid seems to be a mitigating factor. Really, one remains incredulous, once again in a case of femicide a mitigating factor is found. How many mitigating factors can there be for male violence against women?». And again, the group leader of the Alleanza Verdi and Sinistra italiana in the Chamber, Luana Zanellastates: «It seems impossible that a ruling by the Court of Cassation considers Covid stress as a mitigating factor for a femicide. In this way, the ideological and cultural infrastructure of the patriarchy that fuels male violence against women will never be demolished».
The Messina Matilda Syracuseundersecretary for Relations with Parliament, calls the sentence “surreal”: “According to the judges of the Supreme Court, the boy who killed the medical student, originally from Favara, in the province of Agrigento, was stressed by Covid and, therefore, his sentence will have to be reevaluated. An incredible story, a new painful wound for Lorena’s family and for all the women who ask for justice and not schizophrenic sentences constructed only to try to justify the indefensible”.
“The decision of the Court of Cassation to annul the life sentence of Antonio De Pace, author of the femicide of Lorena Quaranta, who was strangled by him, leaves us astonished but also very worried. To think that stress, whatever its presumed origin, could be considered a mitigating circumstance risks creating a dangerous precedent in an area, that of combating violence against women, which is already quite delicate. There can be no justification, no mitigating circumstance for such a brutal act of violence. In our country we risk a dangerous step backwards that certainly does not respect the memory of all the victims. The spiral of femicides must be stopped, and to do so we need everyone’s support”. This is what the parliamentarians of the 5 Star Movement in the bicameral commission of inquiry into femicide and gender violence wrote in a note Stefania Ascari, Anna Bilotti, Alessandra Maiorino and Daniela Morfino.