Assisted suicide, advice and directions to the clinic are not incitement

The advice and psychological support given to a patient who has already chosen to resort to assisted suicide, are not sufficient for the crime of inducement to commit suicide. The Cassazione (judgement 17945) deposited the grounds with which it annulled with referral the three-year and four-month sentence imposed on Emilio Coveri, president of Exit Italia, by the Court of Appeal in June 2023. The case concerns the death, in Switzerland in 2019, of 47-year-old Alessandra Giordano. A teacher suffering from a rare chronic neuralgia, Eagle syndrome, which was very painful and had led her to depression and caused her severe suffering. The Court of Appeal had also ordered Coveri to be banned from public office for five years as an accessory penalty and to pay damages to the civil parties who had appeared at the trial, five of the woman's relatives. According to the prosecutor's thesis, accepted by the appeal judges, the president of Exit Italia would have provided 'a causal contribution capable of reinforcing the intention to commit suicide'. A conclusion reached by enhancing the contents of the conversations between Giordano and Coveri published by the defendant himself on the association's website.

Telephone calls during which Giordano informed the president of Exit Italia, about the progress of the proceedings initiated with the Dignitas clinic and thanked him for the support and advice he had received, during numerous contacts that were apparent from the phone records. For the territorial judges, this was sufficient to prove that the defendant had influenced the woman and had strengthened her will. There was therefore the typical conduct of the offence of incitement to suicide under Article 580 of the Penal Code. A reading that, in the Supreme Court's opinion, runs the risk "of overstretching the objective perimeter of the case to the point of including any human conduct that has in any case aroused or strengthened another person's suicidal will, however freely formed".

For the Court of Cassation, the defendant, at the head of an association committed to promoting a 'culture of dignity of death', had expressed his personal opinions in favour of an assisted death, preferable to a life of suffering. Too little to sustain that his aim was to induce the woman to decide to die, coercing her will with a modality considered 'underhand'. The Court of Cassation therefore concludes that 'it is evident how the judges of merit have surreptitiously sought to configure in Coveri's head a sort of position of guarantee towards those who turn to the association he presides over, by reason of which it would not be lawful for him to express his general opinions on the end of life, having instead to take charge of the plausible situation of psychological fragility of his interlocutors, if not actually dissuade them from their intentions. The ermines distanced themselves from the automatism of a fragile and therefore influential subject, in the face of evidence of a choice, on Giordano's part, already made to the extent that she contacted Exit Italia so that it could direct her to a suitable structure to assist her in her decision to end her life.