The Italian Supreme Court has annulled the life sentence to which he had been sentenced a nurse for the murder of his girlfriendconsidering that the Stress caused by the COVID-19 pandemic could be a mitigating factorand, in a ruling that has caused widespread shock in the country.

The judges of the Court of Reggio Calabria (south) “did not verify whether the specificity of the context in which the crime was committed, the first period of the pandemic and the difficulty of remedying it, constituted a factor that determined the scope of criminal liability“, reads the reasons for the Supreme Court’s ruling, according to the newspaper The Gazette of the South.

The nurse Antonio De Pace He strangled his girlfriend, medical student Lorena Quaranta, in Furci Siculo (Sicily) on 31 March 2020, during the first phase of the pandemic, when the emergency situation and restrictions could have affected the behaviour of the convicted man.

The Supreme Court asserts that the Calabrian court should have better verified “to what extent the accused can be blamed for not having effectively tried to counteract the state of anguish of which he was a victim“, so the sentence will now be reviewed, since The stress that the nurse was suffering could be an attenuating factor in favor of the convicted person.

His parents, “hurt, indignant and angry”

Annulment with deferral of life imprisonment does not affect the murder conviction, Since, after strangling Quaranta, the nurse himself called the police and confessed to the crime. The young woman’s parents have expressed their ““hurt, indignant and angry” for the sentence, while associations that fight against violence against women have warned of the “dangerous” motivations of the Supreme Court, since they could allow other convicted persons to resort to generic mitigating circumstances to avoid a life sentence.

“Femicide cannot and should not have any mitigating circumstances. The atrocious act was committed as an expression of a man’s power over a woman. We stand by Lorena Cuarenta’s family and continue our battle to obtain a fair sentence,” said Cettina Miasi, president of the association “Una de Nosótras.” Miasi stressed that the Supreme Court’s decision was made in “a courtroom where the only two women were the lawyer and the psychologist of ‘Una de Nosotros,’ according to the same sources.