lenient sentence but life sentence for murder extended “indefinitely”

He was sentenced to a lenient sentence (8 months’ imprisonment) “due to the triviality of the crime committed”. An executive sentence which however once again extends “indefinitely” the life sentence he was serving and which, probably, was now nearing its end.

This is the sentence read yesterday by the Parma court against Enzo Berni: now 60 years old of Sampiero origins, the only life prisoner among the sentences issued after the murder of the 17 year old Thomas Salaroli from Cesena.

Enzo Berni has been in prison since 1997. He was arrested a few days after the discovery (it was December 26th of that year) of the body of Thomas Salaroli: a boy hit by a gunshot to the head, killed for settling accounts in the environment of the micro drug dealing at the foot of the church of Santa Lucia in Roversano. Materially, the person who shot and killed was a minor (who served three years of probation) but Enzo Berni, during the trial, was considered by the Assize judges among the various defendants to be the only one deserving of life imprisonment: which in Italy usually means a sentence of just over 30 years. A sentence to be served which, over time, decreases due to good behavior and almost never (at least if one is young enough at the time of the sentence) translates into a “life” sentence as in the collective imagination.

Three years ago, Berni had already been under semi-freedom in Parma for some time. He worked in a police station and returned to a light wing from prison only in the evening. He decided to escape from imprisonment because he was not transferred to “day work” in a private cooperative, which is usually the precursor to complete release and the end of the rehabilitation process of a lifer. «I didn’t even know where to go and I didn’t even have my life-saving medicines with me. I am sorry for what I did,” he told the judges during the trial. Berni didn’t go back to sleep at night: he took a train and then a bus moving from Parma to Modena. After three days the police tracked him down in an abandoned house. “I couldn’t stand it anymore and, after 3 years, I believed I had the right to move from working in the barracks to working in a private cooperative” he said in court. The prosecution for him yesterday during the requests pushed for a sentence of 8 months of imprisonment for the tenuousness of the crime committed. The defense (lawyer Francesco Minutillo) had asked for acquittal or alternatively the 8-month sentence which was then awarded. A “mild” sentence therefore. But Berni’s rehabilitation process was interrupted on the day of his escape. In fact, this sentence (the reasons for which will be known in 90 days) contributes to increasing to an unknown extent the life sentence which, before escaping, he had already finished serving.