They were accused of having threatened and pulled some penitentiary police officers at the Agrigento prison to prevent them from taking two prisoners into solitary confinement. The single judge of the Agrigento court, Fulvia Veneziano, ordered the acquittal “because the fact does not exist” against six prisoners. They are Rosario Moscato, 33 years old from Gela; Paolo Vitellaro, 33 years old from Gela; Antonino Capizzi, 51 years old from Palermo; Alfonso Fiammetta, 50 years old from Catania; Gaetano Licata, 41 years old from Santa Maria Capua Vetere; Pietro Flamia, 66 years old from Palermo. The story dates back to 2018.
The six inmates were all imprisoned in the Agrigento prison when, according to the prosecution’s reconstruction, they made threats to an inspector and his assistants: “He’ll steal your head and throw you a piece of cop” or “His colleague will he was disrespectful and therefore if I see him in the ward I will break his head and show him how a real attack on the part of the inmates takes place”. All this – again according to the accusatory reconstruction – to prevent the officers from placing the Gelese men Moscato and Vitellaro in isolation, considered responsible for serious disciplinary violations.
At the end of the hearing, the court accepted the defense arguments of the lawyers Giovanni Castronovo, Salvatore Cusumano, Giuseppe Buongiorno and Cristina Alfieri, deeming that no evidence of conduct that could be classified as resistance to a public official had emerged. Specifically, the preliminary investigation would have demonstrated the erroneousness of the challenge raised by the Public Prosecutor’s Office of Agrigento since the disciplinary sanction in question was regularly applied against the two prisoners. Furthermore, the threats uttered by all the prisoners were expressed to a person other than the actual recipient, thus eliminating the evidence that they had actually been received with consequent disturbance to the same.
