The judges, the “Covid stress”, the life sentence cancelled: why Lorena Quaranta’s femicide shows that we understand nothing about femicide

Lorena Quaranta, with a fever, had looked for him: “Love, please come back!” He, the boyfriend, Antonio De Pace, had in fact escaped to Messina to re-embark towards Calabria, where the family lived, gripped by the fear of being infected by Covid (even though the family members were also sick): we are in fact at the end of March 2020, in full lockdown for the Covid 19 pandemic.

After several messages, De Pace returned, only to strangle her with his bare hands shortly after. He had called the police himselfafter a suicide attempt, explaining that he feared he had been infected by his girlfriend. Arrested, after two degrees of judgment that had sentenced him to life imprisonment, today he sees a turning point in his trial: the Court of Cassation has annulled with referral, limited to the applicability of mitigating circumstances, the life sentence for the crime of March 31, 2020. That is, it has accepted the requests of the defense, according to which De Pace was suffering from a temporary mental infirmity due to stress and fear of the virus, which would represent a mitigating factor.

Who was Lorena Quaranta

Lorena was a 27-year-old medical student, originally from Favara, in the province of Agrigento, who was about to graduate, and who had met Antonio De Pace, a nurse and dentistry student at the university: the two were engaged and had been living together for three years in a villa in Furci Siculo, between Taormina and Messina. During the trial, the judge analyzed the messages between Lorena and Antonio, which show De Pace’s growing anguish. However, the court’s psychiatric consultation had found no signs of psychosisbut attributed the murder to the anguish caused by the pandemic and to a personality prone to violence, a personality that was later confirmed during detention. Lorena’s family has meanwhile expressed deep indignation at the decision of the Supreme Court.

Why the life sentence was cancelled

De Pace’s defense has long been asking for a review of the trial, arguing that his temporary mental infirmity had not been adequately considered. Now, the Court of Cassation writes in the reasons for the sentence published today by Southern Gazette: «It must be considered that the judges of merit have not fully verified whether, given the specificity of the context, can, and to what extent, the defendant be held responsible for not having effectively attempted to counteract the state of anguish to which he was subjected? and, in parallel, whether the source of the discomfort, evidently represented by the arrival of the pandemic emergency with all that it has determined on the life of each individual and, therefore, also of the protagonists of the affair, and, even more, the contingent difficulty of remedying it constitute factors affecting the measure of criminal liability”.

The reactions of politics

There have also been reactions from women politicians, of all stripes. The Democratic Party deputy Michaela DiBiase wrote on Facebook: “I am speechless.” And the leader of the Green and Left Alliance 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. Thus the ideological and cultural infrastructure of patriarchy will never be destroyed. which fuels male violence against women”. On the government party front, the deputy group leader of Fratelli d’Italia in the Chamber Alfredo Antoniozzisignatory of the proposed law to amend Articles 88 and 89 of the Criminal Code that regulate mental infirmity and semi-infirmity, commented: “once again the Court of Cassation, which remains the guardian of legality and law, surprises us. The sentence with which the life sentence of Lorena Quaranta’s murderer is annulled because Covid stress must be taken into account leaves us frankly astonished”.

What does the case of Lorena Quaranta teach us?

That, once again, a perfect femicide, about which there is no doubt – a man kills a woman because he knows he can do it, because he considers her his property – is “attenuated”, “trivialized”, with the excuse of “stress”, despite the psychiatric assessment having deemed the defendant capable of understanding and willing.

Even anti-violence associations have expressed doubts about the sentence. “This orientation scares us” explained to MessinaToday the lawyer Cettina La Torre, constituted as civil party as the center By your side. «And it jeopardises the certainty of punishment. If every time a femicide occurs we have to consider the emotional state of the person who committed such a brutal crime, then it means that everything can be justified.any murder. A dangerous orientation that puts the protection of women at risk and does not provide justice. In that period we were all stressed but this does not authorize strangling. With this sentence we have taken a terrible step backwards “concludes. Also Cettina Miasi of the Anti-Violence Center One of uswho waited for the reasons for the sentence before speaking, states in a note: «What concerns us objectively is to believe that the emotional state is decisive in the evaluation of the seriousness of the homicidal act because such an evaluation in bloody facts of this kind could always be valid in any case and therefore affect the sentence. The message that is given to the community therefore appears misleading. Therefore we cannot remain silent. The climate experienced on May 30th in front of a Court composed only of men in a room where the only woman was the lawyer of our anti-violence center It gave the impression that justice for Lorena’s death would not have its final word that day.”