The Supreme Court of Cassation declared the only two appeals presented inadmissible, thus putting an end, after exactly seven years, to the judicial case linked to the death of Matteo ‘Balla’ Ballardini, the 19-year-old student who died of a methadone overdose after 13 hours of agony on 12 April 2017 in Lugo in his car purposely left in an out-of-the-way car park by the four young people with him the previous night.
For two of them, given that neither the general prosecutor’s office nor their respective defenses had appealed, the sentences had already become final at the end of last October. Starting from the seven years inflicted in total in the encore appeal to the 26-year-old from Lavezzola Beatrice ‘Bea’ Marani who, according to the police investigations coordinated by the prosecutor Marilù Gattelli, had provided the 19-year-old with the bottles of methadone which proved fatal and arrived from the Sert of Ravenna as part of a therapeutic program opened in anonymity: a behavior, that of the girl (now a social health worker defended by the lawyer Fabrizio Capucci), framed as death as a consequence of another crime, drug dealing.
The sentence had already become final for 26-year-old Giovanni Simone Palombo from Lugo (lawyer Raffaele Coletta): i.e. 3 years 6 months and 20 days of imprisonment for aggravated manslaughter.
As regards the 32-year-old Leonardo Morara from Lugo (lawyer Carlo Benini), an appeal had been filed before the Court of Cassation but only for the failure to recognize the continuation between the sentence inflicted for the sale of drugs and that for aggravated manslaughter: for him the
final sentence in the appeal-bis, now therefore definitive, amounts to 5 years 3 months and 10 days.
Finally, the 29-year-old Ayoub Kobabi (lawyer Nicola Laghi), of Moroccan origin but resident in Lugo, had received 3 years 4 months in the bis appeal thanks to the fact that the prosecution had attributed to him a minor role in the incident with aggravating circumstances considered equivalent to the mitigating factors. Despite this, he was the only one to have asked for a new trial. As regards the civil party – the parents of the deceased protected by the lawyer Alberto Padovani – he had already expressed his intention not to appeal. “It seems to me to be a balanced sentence – said their lawyer immediately after the last appeal – and I am pleased that they recognized homicidal conduct albeit in the culpable but more serious form: that is, with prediction of the event, that is, very close to the line of border with possible malice. I now hope that it ends here, without anyone having further recourse.”
The legal case linked to the death of the 19-year-old had oscillated between voluntary homicide with possible malice resulting in the first degree in Ravenna at the end of the abbreviated trial. And the simple failure to help a boy in difficulty, outlined in the first Bolognese appeal. In the end, on 18 April last year, after more than three hours of deliberation, the assize court of appeal-bis of Bologna had mostly framed the facts as
manslaughter aggravated by the prediction of the event: a classification which at this point appears to be definitive.
Andrea Colombari
