Nurse who strangled her girlfriend “due to pandemic stress” has her life sentence commuted

The Italian Supreme Court has annulled the life sentence given to a nurse for the murder of his girlfriend, noting that the stress caused by the Covid-19 pandemic may have been a mitigating factor, a sentence that has caused shock across 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 its resolution became a factor that determined the scope of criminal responsibility.”Reads the motivations of the Supreme Court’s decision, as revealed by the newspaper “La Gazeta del Sud”.

Nurse Antonio De Pace strangled his girlfriend, medical student Lorena Quarantaon March 31, 2020, in Furci Siculo (Sicily), in the first phase of the pandemic, in which the state of emergency and restrictions could influence the behavior of the convicted person.

The Supreme Court assures that the Calabrian court should have done better verification “The extent to which the accused can be held responsible for not having tried effectively to counteract the situation of suffering to which he was subjected”, therefore, the sentence will now be reviewed, as the stress suffered by the nurse could be a mitigating factor in favour of the convict.

The cancellation of the life sentence does not affect the murder conviction, because, after strangling Quaranta, the nurse herself called the police and confessed to the crime.

The parents of the young woman are “saddened, enraged and furious” at the sentence, while associations fighting against violence against women have warned about the “dangerous” nature of the Supreme Court’s motivations, since they could allow others to resort to the usual mitigating circumstances to avoid life imprisonment.

“There are not and should not be any extenuating circumstances for femicide. This atrocious act was committed as an expression of a man’s power over a woman. We support the relatives of Lorena Cuarenta and continue their fight for a fair punishment,” said Cetina Miasi, president of the association “Una de Nosotras”.

Miyasi highlighted that the Supreme Court’s decision “was adopted in a room where there were only two women from ‘One of Us’ – a lawyer and a psychologist”, reports Efe.