The act is not foreseen by the law as a crime, because those milk cans were nothing more than offshoots of their bodies, and not "devices or other objects" that the shepherds "displayed as an evocative symbol of their protest". Not only. The protest, although not formally endorsed, had the support of the institutions. First of all the mayors, but also the ministers, who joined the protest marches of the Sardinian shepherds here.
With this motivation today the judge of the Court of Nuoro, Claudia Falchi Delitala, acquitted the shepherds who ended up on trial because on 8 February 2019 they had participated on the 131 dcn state road, at kilometer 92.8 near Siniscola, along the route Abbasanta-Nuoro, at a protest demonstration for the low price of milk, blocking traffic.
The judge, accepting the requests of the defendants' defenders, Mario Silvestro Pittalis, Antonello Cao, Francesco Lai, Margherita Baragliu, Rinaldo Lai, Giulia Lai, Adriano Sollai and Marcella Cabras, who have always maintained that the road block dispute was a question of administrative and not criminal relevance, acquitted all the accused, sending the documents to the prefect insofar as he was responsible.
Antonio Cidu, Natale Ghisu, Manuele Carta, Antonio Carta, Luigi Francesco Meloni, Davide Mulargia, Gianbattista Loi, Bastiano Lai, Piero Mulargia, Giovanni Boccoli, Federico Turoni, Giuseppe Sale, Giovanni Arduino Cossu, Marco Lutzu did not commit any crime that day , Francesco Congiu, Mario Pau, Luigi Carru, Giovanni Pipere, Salvatore Funedda, Marco Bandinu, Alessio Fadda, Francesco Carta, Paola Porta, Cinzia Conteddu, Salvatore Cossu, Pasquale Mulargia.
The judge also continues her reasons by explaining that throughout the whole affair "the drums had only a moral and symbolic value and not a material one". And he wanted to highlight how «the large majority of public opinion (Sardinian and not only) sympathized with the shepherds, sharing their demands since the drama of the objective uneconomical nature of milk sales prices had brought a sector to its knees nerve center of the island's economy, exposing a multitude of families to the sudden risk of poverty. Furthermore, the farmers' reasons had been supported both by politicians of various parties and by local and national institutions, so much so that the mayors often joined the demonstrations and the ministers of the Republic explicitly expressed their support for the demonstrations through declarations. public".
An encouragement, which according to the Court of Nuoro since it came from the authorities «could have easily determined in subjects (possibly not particularly educated and in any case not experts in law) the belief that the demonstration, beyond the failure to respect some bureaucratic formalism, was substantially fair or at least not criminally relevant".
