In March 2020, in full lockdown due to the Covid pandemic, he killed his 27-year-old girlfriend Lorena Quaranta by suffocating her.

For this Antonio De Pace was sentenced to life imprisonment for aggravated murder. But the Court of Cassation ordered a new appeal process, because the judges of first and second instance did not consider that the stress linked to the pandemic had a bearing on the femicide.

In the new appeal, therefore, there could be a revision of the sentence and the man could be granted generic mitigating circumstances.

History

Lorena Quaranta was about to graduate in medicine and had been experiencing a sore throat for a few weeks. And De Pace, a nurse, perhaps convinced that he had contracted the virus, had decided to return to his relatives in Calabria. She begged him to stay, to be close to her and bring her medicine. But he, after an argument, strangled her in Furci Siculo's apartment, in the Messina area, where the two had been living together for a year. Then he attempted suicide, before notifying the police.

The sentence

«The judges of merit – we read in the sentence – did not verify whether the specificity of the context, the Covid period and the difficulty of remedying it constitute factors affecting the measure of criminal responsibility»

«It must be estimated - we read in the published reasons - that the judges of merit did not fully verify whether, given the specificity of the context, it can be attributed, and to what extent, to the accused for not having effectively attempted to counteract the state of anguish of the which was the prey and, at the same time, whether the source of the discomfort, evidently represented by the arrival of the pandemic emergency with all that it has determined on the lives of each one and, therefore, also of the protagonists of the story, and, even more, the contingent difficulty to remedy them constitute factors affecting the extent of criminal liability".

(Unioneonline)