Giulia Cecchettin, sentencing date set for Filippo Turetta –

Everyone agrees to close as quickly as possible the trial of Filippo Turetta for the murder of his ex-girlfriend Giulia Cecchettin with an epilogue already set for December 3rd. In a climate of ‘peace’ that is rarely seen in the courts, the prosecution, the defense and the judges agree at the first hearing to give ‘as good’ all the material collected in the investigations which thus flows into the trial file. In essence, the Court of Assizes of Venice will decide the sentence on the basis of the testimonies given to investigators after the crime of 11 November 2023, of Turetta’s confession and of the technical investigations, including the autopsy and the findings on the body of the aspiring girl engineer who loved drawing comics. The trial is thus reduced to the bare bones: the examination of the accused scheduled for the dates of 25 and 28 October and which, in the perspective of his lawyer, Giovanni Caruso, is necessary above all “to honor Giulia’s memory”, the indictment of the pm Andrea Petroni and the council chamber with the verdict of the eight popular judges, five men and three women, presided over by Giuseppe Manduzio.

The Prosecutor’s Office withdraws its list of thirty witnesses, including carabinieri and family members, the defense the only one it had indicated, the medical examiner. A solution that seems to be able to bring benefits to everyone. To the university student imprisoned in the Verona prison engaged, as reported by the defender, in a “personal maturation process for the very serious crime committed” in the name of which he had already waived the preliminary hearing to speed up the trial. An attitude that perhaps in the first instance will not bear fruit in reducing the sentence, which will probably be that of life imprisonment for multi-aggravated voluntary homicide, concealment of a corpse, possession of weapons and kidnapping, but which could guarantee him a ‘discount’ in appeal to 30 years if combined with a virtuous path in prison. As for the accusation, the prosecutor Bruno Cherchi insisted a lot in one of the pauses in the hearing on the refusal of a “spectacularisation” of the trial and brevity meets this hope.

The magistrate went so far as to state that “it would be serious if Filippo Turetta had not participated in the hearing today due to media pressure”. «The trial serves to ascertain personal responsibilities – he theorizes – and it is not a trial against femicide but of a single subject who is called Turetta and must answer for a fact that is contested against him. It is not a sociological study but the assessment of a single position.” Position similar to that of Caruso who invites us not to elect Turetta as a “banner against the battle on gender violence” while applauding the commitment made by Giulia’s family to raise public awareness of feminicides. In the absence of the confessed criminal, all eyes are on Gino Cecchettin, who appeared in many moments only with his pain and his gaze ‘elsewhere’, in the absence of his children Elena, who studies in the USA, and Davide, at school (“We said goodbye like every day, without talking about the trial”). And once again, as in the hours immediately following the murder, the man reappears at the door of the Vigonovo villa, among hundreds of flowers and soft toys, rejecting what the media siege often stimulates: anger against the culprit. «I don’t hope for any kind of revenge or favour, I’m sure that the judges will decide as best they can. Being here renews my pain, I have full faith in the institutions and the punishment they decide will be the right one.” The judges admit him as a civil party (his request is for one million for the damages suffered), together with Giulia’s uncle (150 thousand), his brother Davide (380 thousand), his sister Elena and his grandmother Carla Gatto (150 thousand) who is in the classroom to support his son Gino. The discussion of the parties, prosecutors, civil parties and defense is scheduled for 25 and 26 November, then the sentence with a lightning-fast timing as much as the “noise” created in the squares, schools and homes by Giulia Cecchettin’s story seems not to have end.