He was definitively acquitted, after almost 8 years, Marco Venturi who was accused of the death of his ex-girlfriend, the 37-year-old stylist Carlotta Benusigliofound hanged with a scarf from a tree in the gardens of Piazza Napoli in Milan on the night of May 31, 2016.
He decided it the Court of Cassation which rejected the appeal of the Milanese Attorney General’s Office, who had asked for the second instance sentence to be annulled. Verdict with which the first degree sentence of 6 years for death as a result of stalking was cancelled, even if the Prosecutor’s Office had insisted on murder, a hypothesis also rejected by the Court of Appeal.
All appeals rejected
As we learned from legal sources, the Court of Cassation, after the hearing in the morning, rejected all the appeals proposed both by the General Prosecutor’s Office of Milan and by the civil parties, i.e. the designer’s sister and mother. Last October 11th, the Milanese Assize Court of Appeal had swept away both the Prosecutor’s thesis on the murder that the verdict of the first degree judge on “death as a consequence of another crime”, acquitting Venturi, defended by the lawyer Andrea Belotti, “because the fact does not exist” of all charges. In the appeal, the Milan Prosecutor’s Office had once again supported the hypothesis of death as a consequence of stalking and no longer that of murder. Appeal which the Supreme Court judge asked the judges to reject at the hearing.
The other sentences
At first instance, the preliminary hearing judge Raffaella Mascarino decided that it was not a case of murderbut of a suicide or a demonstrative act that ended in tragedy, caused by the ex-partner, who subjected Benusiglio to physical and psychological harassment for two years. Conviction canceled in second instance for the 47-year-old by the judges (president Ivana Caputo, speaker Franca Anelli). According to the Court, Benusiglio killed herself, after yet another argument with her boyfriend, and the alleged stalking was “non-existent”. In this case, then, the judges wrote, there would not even be a need for a trial, but the results of the “evidentiary incident” were sufficient, i.e. the expert opinion which established that it had been a suicide.
Today, as pointed out by the new plaintiff’s lawyer Niccolò Vecchioni, the prosecutor explained at the hearing that the investigations should, if anything, have been oriented towards the hypothesis of incitement to suicide. In the proceedings over these eight years, Venturi had gone from a simple witness at the beginning to being investigated for incitement to suicide and in the process of being dismissed, to then being accused of voluntary homicide and sentenced to death as a consequence of another crime. Finally, definitively acquitted.
