MODENA. Sentenced to twenty-one years for killing his mother. This is what was established yesterday by the Court of Assizes of the Modena court for Carlo Evangelisti, a 50-year-old who killed 71-year-old Milena Calanchi by crushing her on 16 November 2021. The prosecutor’s office had asked for a life sentence, while for the defense – represented by the lawyer Roberto Ghini – it would not have been a matter of voluntary homicide: the woman’s death would have occurred due to a series of contributing causes, starting from the state of alteration due to the abuse of alcohol where Evangelisti was found that day. While waiting to read the reasons for the sentence, Ghini announces that he will appeal.
The crime
According to the prosecution, the 50-year-old jumped on his mother’s body, according to the defense he fell on her after an argument, while drunk. The 71-year-old was found dead in her home in Via Dei Manzini on 16 November 2021. During the trial, in which Evangelisti was accused of voluntary homicide, prosecutors and defense consultants alternated in the courtroom and are expressed on the possible causes of Calanchi’s death. In the end, the Court accepted the reconstruction of the accusation.
The defence
«The Court – says the lawyer Roberto Ghini, who assisted Carlo Evangelisti in this proceeding – rejected the request for a life sentence made by the public prosecutor and this is, at least, a positive fact. However, the Court of Assizes considered that there was a desire to kill and I consider this decision to be profoundly wrong.” Ghini announces that he will appeal “convinced that the judge of second instance will be able to frame this matter in its actual reality”. The lawyer, throughout the entire trial, firmly maintained that the accused had no intention of killing his mother.
«He had no reason to – he emphasizes – and in years of difficult and painful cohabitation he had never, I repeat never, had violent attitudes towards her. Annoying yes but never violent or even threatening.
In court
The death of Mrs. Milena Calanchi, as adequately reconstructed by our technical consultant Prof. Barbieri, did not depend on a voluntary choice of the son but was, rather, the result of a series of causes. That the defendant had returned home that night in a state of very strong drunkenness (so much so that he could not stand up) is a fact ascertained in the courtroom. What happened that night, once he returned home, remains a mere hypothesis. And no one in the courtroom was able to adequately reconstruct it. The victim, for example, had no injuries to the neck, face or hands. No self-defense injuries. The dynamics of the death, then, appear perfectly compatible with what the defendant reported from the first moments and that is, that he had collapsed on his mother and that he had woken up only some time later with his mother, by then, no longer conscious.
