“Boyfriend Stressed by Covid” –

The reasons of the Court of Cassation have been made known in the case of the femicide of Lorena Quaranta, the medical student, originally from Favara, in the province of Agrigento, killed in a villa in Furci Siculo, in the Messina area, on March 31, 2020 in the first phase of the pandemic. And it is precisely in reference to an alleged ‘stress from Covid’, that the decision of the Court of Cassation is based. For this femicide, the Court of Assizes of Appeal of Messina confirmed the sentence of life imprisonment for Antonio De Pace, a Calabrian nurse who at the time was the boyfriend of the student. The Court of Cassation annulled the sentence limited to the applicability of the generic mitigating circumstances with referral for a new trial, only on this point, to the Court of Assizes of Appeal of Reggio Calabria confirming the rest. According to the judges, after having retraced the entire story, “it must be considered – they write – that the judges of merit have not fully verified whether, given the specificity of the context, it can be attributed, and to what extent, to the defendant for not having “effectively attempted to counteract” the state of anguish to which he was prey and, in parallel, whether the source of the discomfort, evidently represented by the arrival of the pandemic emergency; with all that it has determined in the life of each person and, therefore, also of the protagonists of the story, and, even more, the contingent difficulty of remedying it, constitute factors affecting the measure of criminal liability”. Lorena was probably killed at the height of a violent argument that broke out in the villa in Furci Siculo where the two fiancés lived together. It was De Pace himself who called the police after attempting suicide. Lorena Quaranta, was attending the last year of the faculty of Medicine, was close to graduating and dreamed of becoming a doctor. The reasons of the Court of Cassation have raised a reaction from the anti-violence center Una di noi: «Reading the reasons leaves us dismayed and deeply alarmed for the protection of all women like Lorena», writes the lawyer Cettina Miasi.