Man acquitted after assault on 13-year-old; following Meloni’s outburst, the ANM responds: ‘Unsubstantiated attacks’
Just two nights in prison for a convenience shop owner; the investigating magistrate releases him on condition that he reports regularly to the authorities, and Nordio sends in inspectors. Magistrates on the front line
Key points
The case is shocking and has provoked a strong reaction from the Government, with the Minister for Justice Carlo Nordio sending in inspectors and the Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni once again attacking the rulings of magistrates who, in her view, are hindering public safety: A 42-year-old man from Bangladesh sexually assaulted a 13-year-old girl in his convenience shop in Madonna di Campagna, on the far northern outskirts of Turin. He was arrested and then released by the investigating magistrate after just two nights in custody because ‘he proved cooperative’.
The day after the barrage of criticism, however, the National Magistrates’ Association issued a response, with its president Giuseppe Tango strongly condemning the ‘various unrestrained attacks by senior government figures, which have gone beyond mere criticism’ of the order. It also branded the deployment of inspectors as ‘unorthodox’.
Abuses captured on CCTV
The news, which broke in the press on the morning of 1 September, is doing the rounds on social media, sparking widespread anger and dismay. This is partly because the assault – reported by the 13-year-old girl, who immediately phoned her mother and waited on the pavement for a friend to arrive – was captured on CCTV, which had even recorded another assault, against an adult woman, committed by the same man just 40 minutes earlier.
According to the investigating judge, the man ‘showed remorse’
Yet, after just two nights in a cell at Lorusso e Cutugno prison and against the public prosecutor’s advice, the arrest was not upheld and the shopkeeper was released. The investigating magistrate ruled that the man had ‘shown remorse’; he had handed over the shop’s CCTV footage to the police himself and, during the validation hearing, had expressed ‘regret’, whilst exercising his right to remain silent. Furthermore, in the judge’s view, the ‘trauma of the arrest’ could serve as a sufficient deterrent.
The protests
The wave of outrage cuts across all sections of society: women, first and foremost, are protesting against the judge’s blatant (and, sadly, all too frequent) downplaying of the violence and the risk of reoffending. Outside Turin police headquarters, a demonstration is taking place under the slogan ‘Let’s close the paedophile market’, organised by representatives of Fdi, led by the deputy group leader in the Chamber of Deputies, Augusta Montaruli, and the vice-president of the Piedmont Region, Maurizio Marrone, who denounce as ‘unacceptable’ the fact that the man can return to work as if nothing had happened. PD MPs on the Femicide Committee describe it as a ‘very serious case’. The M5S promises to table a parliamentary question.
