Alessia Pifferi: her age confirmed as 24, but no leniency due to the media furore
The grounds for the final conviction have been filed for allowing his daughter, who was less than a year and a half old, to die of starvation: the risk of death was accepted
Key points
It was unreasonable to ‘hope’ that little Diana, aged less than one and a half, would not die after being left alone at home in a cot with bars for six days, with two bottles containing water and milk. Alessia Pifferi therefore acted with intent because, despite her acknowledged vulnerabilities, she was capable of realising the risk of a fatal outcome as a consequence of her behaviour.
The Court of Cassation has published the grounds on which, last June, it upheld the sentence of 24 years imposed on Alessia Pifferi for allowing her daughter to die of starvation in July 2022. The judges of the first criminal court rejected both the appeals lodged by the Attorney General, seeking a harsher sentence, and those lodged by the defence counsel for the woman, who had been sentenced to life imprisonment at first instance. This sentence was subsequently reduced to 24 years on appeal, partly thanks to the recognition of mitigating circumstances, including the distress she is said to have suffered the media hype surrounding the case. This mitigating factor was overturned by the Court of Cassation, as it was not provided for in the Criminal Code but was the result of the judge’s personal judgement.
The lies and the tampered crime scene
The defence’s argument, which focused on psychological impairment of the defendant to rule out intent and, therefore, the awareness that the little girl would die if left alone in the flat whilst she went to meet a friend – who lived in Leffe, some 80 kilometres from Milan – and whom she had been seeing for some time, having met him online. The Supreme Court upheld the ruling of theMilan Court of Assizes of Appeal, which deemed ‘unreasonable the hope that the defendant claimed to have had that nothing bad would happen to Diana’. In support of this conclusion, the court cited extensive information regarding the environmental conditions in Milan during July 2022: circumstances in which such a young child could not have survived.
Further evidence of the doubts Pifferi herself harboured can be found in the lies she told her mother and her friend, to whom she had claimed she’d left her daughter with a babysitter or with her sister, and her attempt to alterthe crime scene. After the body was discovered, the woman had behaved calmly in order to conceal the traces of the crime: ‘The defendant stated,’ the judgement reads, ‘that she had washed the child and, certainly, had thrown away the nappy she had put on her before leaving the house, traces of which were found in Diana’s stomach, having been swallowed by the child in an attempt to feed herself.’
Cognitive impairment
The witnesses who arrived at the flat stated in court ‘that the woman had seemed more concerned with the consequences that the incident would have for herself than with those for Diana’. To support the argument that she hoped it would not happen, there is no need even for the defence’s argument that Pifferi had, in the past, left her daughter alone without any harm coming to her. The two previous cases of child abandonment had, in fact, been of a significantly shorter duration and involved larger food supplies. As for the defendant’s cognitive deficits – she has an IQ of 40, as established during the trial – in the judges’ view, ‘these affect complex abilities, but there is no evidence that they could have affected an extremely simple ability inherent to daily life, such as the perception of the succession of days”.
