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Alessia Pifferi was sentenced to life imprisonment. The judges found her guilty of letting her 18-month-old daughter, Diana, die of starvation in July 2022. The first degree sentence was pronounced by judge Ilio Mannucci Pacini in the early afternoon of Monday, at the end of a long trial began in March 2023. The prosecutor representing the prosecution had asked for a life sentence, while the woman’s defense asked for acquittal. The woman was accused of multi-aggravated voluntary homicide: it means that she was accused of various aggravating circumstances such as premeditation, having acted within a family context and for “futile and abject” reasons. If convicted, the maximum penalty for this crime is life imprisonment.
Alessia Pifferi lived in Milan in the Ponte Lambro area, a neighborhood near Linate airport, in the south-eastern part of the city. On July 14, 2022, a Thursday, she left the house just before 6pm to join her partner in Leffe, a municipality in Valseriana, in the province of Bergamo. She left her daughter at home alone, without notifying relatives, friends or neighbors. Pifferi told his companion that the little girl was at the seaside with her sister. She told the magistrates who questioned her that she planned to return home the next day, but instead she stayed away from home for almost a week. She returned to Milan only on Wednesday 20 July, shortly after 10 in the morning.
During one of the first hearings of the trial, Pifferi said she immediately realized that her daughter showed no signs of life. She stood still where she had left her. She tried to revive her with cardiac massage, took her to the bathroom to wet her feet, face and head in an attempt to revive her. He then put her in her bed and splashed water in her mouth to make her drink. Only then did she really realize that the little girl was dead: she left the house and asked for help from a neighbor who called for help.
According to the autopsy results, the little girl died of dehydration. Initially, the prosecutor’s consultants said that the little girl had been administered benzodiazepines, i.e. psychotropic drugs that are normally used to manage states of anxiety, to control convulsions and as sedatives. The hypothesis was based on the results of the examination of her hair. The prosecution hypothesized that the child had been induced by drugs into a sort of torpor, to prevent her from crying for help. On the bedside table where she was found there was a bottle of En, a medicine that contains delorazepam, an active ingredient that belongs to the benzodiazepine group.
However, the tests carried out during the so-called evidentiary incident, i.e. the procedure with which the formation of evidence that emerged during the investigations before the actual trial is anticipated and acquired, revealed that in the bottle of water and the baby bottle left to Diana Pifferi there were no “compounds of toxicological interest”. The hair examination at the initial consultation had only identified potential contamination due to the products used by the mother.
Alessia Pifferi had always denied having administered substances to her daughter, except paracetamol (the active ingredient of tachipirina). Pifferi’s lawyers had argued that “the absence of benzodiazepines in the bottle and in the bottle demonstrates that Alessia has always been genuine in her story and, on a legal level, that premeditation lacks concrete elements”.
During the first interrogation, Alessia Pifferi told the magistrates that she had already left the child alone at home for the whole weekend, from Friday to Monday. A friend told investigators that one evening she stopped to sleep with Pifferi, at her partner’s house: «Alessia had kept Diana in the stroller. He didn’t take her to bed with her, but left her there all night,” he said.
In a hearing last September, Pifferi also said that she didn’t know she was pregnant with her daughter: she was born suddenly on January 29, 2021 in the bathroom of her partner’s house, in the province of Bergamo. The little girl, born prematurely, was hospitalized for a month and a half in Bergamo hospital. Pifferi said he didn’t know who her father was.
Alessia Pifferi and the lawyer Alessia Pontenani shortly before the sentence (Stefano Porta/LaPresse)
Throughout the trial there had been a clash between the public prosecutor Francesco De Tommasi and Pifferi’s lawyer, Alessia Pontenani, due to the request presented by the defense for neuroscientific consultancy, i.e. an examination to ascertain whether Alessia Pifferi was capable of understand and want, and therefore processable. The prosecution had always opposed this request, claiming that the lawyer, together with two psychologists from the San Vittore prison where Pifferi was detained, had “put it in her head” that she had no responsibility as she was incapable of understanding and will.
The judges of the Court of Assizes had finally commissioned a psychiatric evaluation, despite the contrary opinion of the prosecution. Elvezio Pirfo, the court’s expert, had established that the woman’s psychiatric condition “is not such as to significantly diminish her ability to understand and will nor to undermine her ability to consciously stand in court”. According to the expert opinion, in short, Pifferi was capable of understanding and wanting.
During the last hearings, the public prosecutor Francesco De Tommasi had asked the judges to sentence Pifferi to life imprisonment. On Monday morning, before the sentence, Pifferi’s lawyer Alessia Pontenani had asked the judges to acquit her of the crime of murder. “She believed that nothing would happen to the little girl,” she said. «You didn’t want to kill her, murder linked to a death due to dehydration does not legally exist. Death exists as a consequence of another crime, namely the abandonment of a minor. I ask that she be acquitted of the crime of murder and sentenced to death as a consequence of the crime of child abandonment.”
After the sentence, the public prosecutor Francesco De Tommasi said that life imprisonment was a fair sentence and that in this way the victim, namely Pifferi’s daughter, was brought back to the center of the trial. «I saw a woman who played a part, I expected life imprisonment. You have been told a story that is not supported in this trial,” the prosecutor said. «Alessia Pifferi was described to you as a victim and a child. In this trial there is only one little girl called Diana and there is only one victim called Diana. There is a liar called Alessia Pifferi, there is only one actress called Alessia Pifferi. Give her the hope of compensating through the suffering of punishment for the pain that will eventually flow through her.”
The request for a psychiatric report requested by the defense is also at the center of a parallel criminal proceeding initiated by the public prosecutor De Tommasi, who requested and obtained from the judge for preliminary investigations to intercept the conversations in prison between Pifferi and two psychologists for two months, investigated for false ideology together with the lawyer Alessia Pontenani. The initiative of the public prosecutor De Tommasi was highly criticized by the criminal chamber of Milan, the association of criminal lawyers who discusses justice problems with the judiciary and other institutions. According to the criminal chamber, the parallel investigation violates several rules and will have consequences that go beyond the case in question, because not only does it compromise assistance to detained people, but it is a direct and illegitimate attack on the role of the defense.
– Read also: In the San Vittore prison in Milan, psychological assistance is almost at a standstill
