Femicide, the state of passion is irrelevant

Severeemotional disturbance does not in any way affect thequantification of the penalty for the crime offeminicide. Nor can other characterial anomalies or alterations and disharmonies of the personality or emotional and passionate states have any weight, 'for the purposes of imputability, unless they fit, exceptionally, into a broader framework of infirmity'. The Court of Cassation filed the grounds with which, on 17 September, it rejected Giovanni Padovani's appeal. The 28-year-old former amateur footballer was sentenced to life imprisonment for the feminicide of his ex-girlfriend Alessandra Matteuzzi. On 23 August 2022, Padovani assaulted her under her house in Bologna, hitting her with kicks, punches, hammer blows and finally hitting her with a bench. In the defence's opinion, the appeal judges had not adequately assessed the relevance on the defendant's capacity to understand and will of the 'serious emotional disturbance' in which he committed the crime.

The decisive point in the trial had been the psychiatric expertise at first instance, which had concluded that Padovani, convicted of aggravated murder by stalking, premeditation and futile motives, had the capacity to make decisions. The defence challenged the judgement's conclusions on the existence of capacity, arguing that specialists from three different prisons had pointed out personality disorders of Padovani, as had the defence consultants. For the Court of Cassation, however, the judgement was consistent, adhering to the conclusions of the experts, but without ignoring the arguments of the party's consultants, which were not only taken into account, but refuted, going beyond what the court system requires.

And also on the subsistence of premeditation, for the Court of Cassation, the sentence of appeal carefully indicated the factual elements from which it drew the judgement on the existence of the 'rootedness and constant persistence, for an appreciable lapse of time, in the psyche of the offender of the homicidal intent' that constitutes the 'proprium' of the aggravating circumstance. The defence's attempt to invoke an application, also in the case of a feminicide, of the new article 55 of the Penal Code that introduced, in relation to the culpable excess of self-defence (redrafted in 2019), the element of 'serious emotional disturbance' as a cause of non-punishability.

For the appellant, a rule that the appeal sentence "did not even touch upon and which, however, would be of interest because the state of emotional alteration can also affect the mitigating effects of the sentence". An argument that the Supreme Court branded as manifestly unfounded in light of Article 90 of the Criminal Code, which excludes the possibility of attributing any relevance to the "emotional and passionate states, unless they are exceptionally part of a broader framework of infirmity, such in consistency, intensity and severity as to concretely affect the capacity to understand and to want, excluding or greatly diminishing it, and provided that there is an aetiological link with the specific criminal conduct, as a result of which the crime is causally determined by the mental disorder'.

For the judges, however, there is the aggravating circumstance of premeditation, also demonstrated by the messages that the defendant had sent to his friend and his mother communicating his intention to carry out an act that he himself described as 'terrible'. The aggravating circumstance of futile and abject motives for the possessive jealousy that had led him to spy on his ex-girlfriend's every move in the wake of frustration at the end of the relationship was also included in the bill.