Alessia Pifferi was sentenced to 24 years in prison for the murder of her 18-month-old daughter Diana, who was left alone at home and starved to death in July 2022. The Milan Court of Assizes of Appeal ruled this. She had been sentenced to life imprisonment in the first instance .
In the first instance, the judges found the woman "competent." The crime charged was not child abandonment or death resulting from another crime, but voluntary homicide because Pifferi, the judges argued, was perfectly aware of the consequences facing little Diana, left alone for six days with "two bottles of milk, two small bottles of water, and one bottle of tea." With the aggravating circumstances and no mitigating circumstances, the sentence imposed was life imprisonment.
In the second instance, the system was maintained, including the woman's capacity to understand and decide, but the mental disorders noted in the second expert report were taken into account. These disorders allowed her to obtain mitigating circumstances equivalent to the aggravating ones, thus leading to a sentence of 24 years .
The prosecutor had asked for the life sentence to be upheld, emphasizing that Alessia left her daughter in "inhumane" conditions for six days. "The conduct we're facing is particularly horrifying, but also particularly difficult to conceptually accept," he said, "because it's a matter of omission. It's not a mother who throws her daughter out a window, but one who leaves a little girl to suffer for five and a half days in the July heat of Milan, without air conditioning and with the windows closed . It's difficult to accept the idea that a person with full capacity could do something like this. We think whoever did it is crazy. But we must now eliminate this from our thinking because we have two official expert reports , in addition to the independent consultants."
The defense had called Alessia Pifferi "an empty vessel," who "can't reason." "All the tests, even those from the first degree, tell us that Pifferi can't reason. She can't find alternative solutions. She's not a normal person. She thinks in her own way. The moment she leaves the baby alone with two bottles for the first time, she comes home and sees that she's fine."
Viviana Pifferi, Alessia's sister, rails against the sentence: "Twenty-four years for something so horrendous. Twenty-four years is the value of an 18-month-old girl who is no longer with us. He left her alone to die while she went out to have fun."
(Unioneonline)