Alessia Pifferi case, no mitigation for media hype

The granting of general extenuating circumstances to Alessia Pifferi, who was sentenced for infanticide of her one-and-a-half year old daughter, in the first instance to life imprisonment, and then, as a result of the attenuating circumstances, with a remodelled sentence of 24 years on appeal, had caused much discussion in the context of an already very exposed judicial case. The media hype that had accompanied the criminal proceedings had also played a role in the granting of mitigating circumstances, for the first time with an impact on the size of the sentence.

Now the Milan Public Prosecutor's Office has challenged the ruling, also contesting the importance given by the appeal judges to the media overexposure. For the Public Prosecutor's Office, in fact, 'the media clamour does not integrate a relevant normative parameter under Article 133 of the Criminal Code, nor can it surreptitiously turn into an element capable of affecting in a favourable sense the assessment of the defendant's personality or his capacity to commit crimes'.

Nor is it clear to the public prosecutor's office how Pifferi's willingness, 'oriented towards self-assertion also in the context of the media trial, can take on positive relevance', rather, what emerges, according to the public prosecution, is a propensity to privilege thepresentation of himself as a victim before the public rather than repentance for his daughter's death.

In general, giving access, among the grounds for recognising forms of mitigation, to the media hype would then be dangerous, warns the Prosecution. "In the current historical perspective," reads the appeal, in which the so-calledmedia criminal trials are unfortunately the order of the day, it could instead set a precedent for any other defendant, with the introduction into the criminal trial of a meta-juridical datum, not provided for by the legal system and that would escape any check of genuineness, all the more so in cases, such as the one in question, in which, as noted in the same judgment under appeal, there were "the same protagonists television of the trial in the courtroom: identical physical persons of the lawyers, current and even with the mandate revoked...'".

Therefore, external and contingent elements, such as the media resonance of the case or the communication dynamics that accompanied it, cannot be brought within the perimeter of the Code's rule, 'since these are phenomena inherent to contemporaneity, factors that, by their nature, do not relate to the subject's capacity to commit a crime, but to thesocial context in which the trial took place'.