OfMilan editorial team
The woman was found lifeless on the night of May 31, 2016. The Court of Cassation rejected the appeal of the Milan Prosecutor’s Office
Was definitively acquittedafter almost 8 yearsMarco Venturi, which was accused of the death of his ex-girlfriendthe 37-year-old fashion designer Carlotta Benusigliofound hanged with a scarf from a tree in the gardens of Piazza Napoli in Milan on the night of May 31, 2016. The Supreme Court decided it rejecting the appeal of the Milan Public Prosecutor’s Office, who had asked for the second instance sentence to be annulled. Verdict with which the first degree sentence of 6 years for death as a consequence of stalking, even if the Prosecutor’s Office had insisted on murder, a hypothesis also rejected by the Court of Appeal.
As we learned from legal sources, the Supreme Court, after the hearing on Wednesday morning, rejected all appeals proposed both by the General Prosecutor’s Office of Milan and by the civil parties, i.e. the designer’s sister and mother. Last October 11th, the Milanese Court of Assizes of Appeal had swept away both the thesis of the Prosecutor’s Office on the murder and the verdict of the first degree judge on “death as a consequence of another crime”, acquitting Venturi, defended by the lawyer Andrea Belotti, “because the fact does not exist” of all charges.
The Milan Public Prosecutor’s Office had in the appeal again supported the hypothesis of death as a consequence of stalking and no longer that of murder. Appeal which the Supreme Court judge asked the judges to reject at the hearing. In the first instance, the preliminary hearing judge Raffaella Mascarino had decided that it was not a murder, but a suicide or a demonstrative act which ended in tragedy, caused by her ex-partner, who allegedly subjected Benusiglio to physical and psychological harassment for two years. Conviction canceled at second instance for the 47-year-old by the judges (president Ivana Caputo, rapporteur Franca Anelli). According to the Court, Benusiglio killed herself, after yet another argument with her boyfriend, and the alleged stalking was “non-existent”. In this case, then, the judges wrote, there would not even be a need for a trial, but the results of “the evidentiary incident” were sufficient, i.e. the expert opinion which established that it had been a suicide. Today, as pointed out by the new plaintiff’s lawyer Niccolò Vecchioni, the prosecutor explained at the hearing that the investigations should, if anything, have been oriented towards the hypothesis of incitement to suicide.
Venturi, in the proceedings in these eight years, had passed from a simple witness at the beginning to being investigated for incitement to suicide and in the process of being archived, until he was subsequently accused of voluntary homicide and sentenced to death as a consequence of another crime. In the end, definitively acquitted.
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May 8, 2024 (modified May 8, 2024 | 5:45 pm)
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