They ended up on trial on charges of having threatened and pulled some penitentiary police officers on duty in the “Pasquale Di Lorenzo” prison to prevent them from taking two inmates 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.
“I’ll steal your head and throw you a piece of cop” or “Your colleague has disrespected us and therefore if I see him in the department I’ll 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 avoid the officers from placing two people from Gelato in isolation who were held 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 qualifying as resistance to a public official had emerged.
