Life imprisonment: this is the decision taken by the Court of Assizes of the Court of Forlì against Daniele Severi, at the end of a deliberation session that lasted 6 and a half hours. The judges – the two judges Monica Galassi and Marco De Leva, and the six lay judges – evaluated the evidence presented during the 18 hearings of the trial relating to the murder of the farmer Franco Severi, 52 years old, found beheaded on 22 June 2022 on an embankment adjacent to the farmhouse where he lived, on the family farm in Seggio di Civitella. And they came to the conclusion that they were sufficient to inflict, in the first instance, life imprisonment.
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Always present in the courtroom, the accused Daniele Severi witnessed the verdict standing in the first bench, among his lawyers, listening impassively to the words of the President of the Court Monica Galassi. It must be said that this is a first degree judgment, the defense team formed by lawyers Massimiliano Pompignoli and Maria Antonietta Corsetti have already announced an appeal of the judgment before the Court of Appeal of Bologna. Life imprisonment with daytime isolation had been the request of prosecutor Federica Messina, while the defense had requested acquittal for the three main charges, returning to the minimum sentence for the last, more secondary charge, the detention of a old gun barrel.
The sentence provides for life imprisonment (but without daytime isolation), perpetual disqualification from public office, publication of the sentence in extract in the municipalities of Forlì, Meldola and Civitella and on the website of the Ministry of Justice for 15 days. The Court also decided a provisional amount of 100 thousand euros to each of the 5 brothers who took part in civil proceedings. Satisfaction was expressed by the lawyer Max Starni, representative of the civil parties, the 5 brothers of Franco and Daniele (Mario, Romano, Milena, Anna Maria and Cesare), who all appeared in court against Daniele.
The civil party: “Justice has been done”
After the sentence, Daniele Severi’s family members (his wife Monia Marchi and children Sara, Samuele and Simone) spoke with the accused, who is now returning to prison in precautionary custody, as decided by the Court of Assizes, awaiting trial of Appeal, which will be set in approximately 8-9 months. The Court has reserved 90 days for filing the reasons. The rest of Franco’s family, through his sister Milena, thanked the investigators and the prosecutor Federica Messina, who left the courtroom a few moments after the reading of the judgment. Also present were around fifty people including journalists, lawyers, family members and simply curious people.
The family of the accused: “A scapegoat condemned”
The accusations
Daniele Severi, retired 118 ambulance driver, 64 years old, in pre-trial detention since July 2022, was accused of voluntary and premeditated murder for having killed “probably by shooting him with gunshots to the head and/or neck, which was followed by decapitation (the end of the brain and the neck were amputated from the corpse) and dragging to a steep cliff adjacent to the victim’s home”. Various aggravating circumstances contested, including cruelty, abject motives, some were not recognized by the Court.
Severi murder, the chronicle of all the hearings
Daniele Severi also had to answer for concealment of a corpse, a crime that is triggered even when only one anatomical part of the body is missing, with the head amputated “with an electric saw or slash”, hypothesizes the Prosecutor’s Office. Another charge for Daniele Severi was stalking his brother, because – according to the charge – he threatened him a few times with cutting off his head with a chainsaw and made him the object of teasing, quarrels and unwanted visits , even at night, so much so that in the last months before his death the victim would have upset his life habits, placing the bed in the kitchen and thus using a single room as accommodation for all his needs, also “bricking up” a door with the refrigerator. Franco Severi had also closed the road with a barrier equipped with padlocks (vandalized several times) and a camera trap, which was later damaged and found at the home of his brother Daniele during the investigations. Finally, the illegal possession of a semi-automatic rifle barrel, then abandoned in via Maglianella, was also contested.
Finally, the Court did not postpone any document to the Prosecutor’s Office, nor as requested by the prosecutor Messina, with the postponement of some investigative documents and interrogations relating to his wife Monia Marchi, on which possible false testimony was suggested relating to the subsequently modified declarations relating to the presence of her husband at home on the evening of the crime. Finally, a further request to refer the documents to the Prosecutor’s Office, formulated this time by Severi’s defence, to request investigations into the hypothesis of alleged coercion by the accused’s detectives to obtain a confession, was also rejected.
