For 4 months Albert Stasisince December 2015 in prison a boiled to serve the 16-year sentence for the murder of his girlfriend Chiara Poggi of 13 August 2007 in Garlasco (Pavia), goes out every day to go to work out and then back in. In fact, on January 24, the 39-year-old was admitted by the Milan Surveillance Tribunal to “external work” after the lawyer Giada Bocellari proposed a “complaint” against a first rejection opposed in October 2022 by the Surveillance judge.
For his employer, who will not be indicated here to avoid interference, the Stasi takes place accounting-administrative duties, with strict prescriptions on the times of exit and return to the cell, on the means of transport that can be used, on the itineraries which must not be deviated from, on the checks. “External work” is not an alternative measure to detention, but a benefit that every prisoner can be granted by the prison director (in a “treatment program” drawn up by the educational area and approved by the Surveillance magistrate) if he has served at least one third of his sentence, if his conduct in prison is positive, if the observation of his personality is comforting.
In the case of Stasi, the judges still had to evaluate the degree of critical review in the light of his own always claimed innocencemost recently with the lawyer Laura Panciroli in the request for revision rejected by the judges in 2021.
In the initial rejection of the “external work”, the judge Maria Paola Caffarena had recognized that the reports from the prison ended up flattening themselves on the declarations of the convict alone, without providing all the criminological elements indispensable for the prognosis. Instead the Court (President Rosanna Calzolari, rapporteur Ornella Anedda), while specifying that “the attitude of denial is legitimate”, reasons on the fact that, depending on the case, thea denial can sometimes underlie personality profiles indexes of unresolved danger, but other times internal dynamics and mechanisms of self-denial. He therefore instructs the prison to deepen Stasi’s psychological observation on issues already covered by the sentence (the relationship with his girlfriend and parents, feelings of anger) or emerged in the interviews (not talking about painful events). And realizing that “never as in this case should the penalty have a reparative purpose not only external, as well as preventive», the Court confides that the reactivation of contacts with the outside and managing work and personal relationships can foster a deeper psychological digging.
In 2015 the final sentence of Stasi, after the annulled acquittals of 2009 and 2011, had reached 16 years through the reduction of a third required by the abbreviated procedure on the maximum basic sentence of 24 years for “simple homicide” after exclusion of the aggravating circumstance of “cruelty”; and in favor of Chiara’s parents he had set 1 million in damages and 150 thousand euros in legal fees.
Only now is it being discovered that the Stasi, while continuing to reject the verdict, gave it effect in 2018 by reaching a settlement with the Poggi family in civil proceedings which commits it to compensate 700,000 euros: half liquidated up to now, and half promised with monthly deductions on the salaries of work first in prison and then out. Stasi has a theoretical end-sentence in 2030, but (like any prisoner of good conduct) the deduction of 45 days of “early release” every 6 months in prison can bring it forward in 2028, with the possibility of requesting probation from 2025.
