Willy Monteiro murder, mitigation denied not for 'aesthetic' reasons

A brutal, repeated, conscious violence. The rejection of the general extenuating circumstances - decided by the first instance judges in the trial against the brothers Marco and Gabriele Bianchi for the murder of Willy Monteiro Duarte - was based on the intensity of the intent and not on ethical or aesthetic motivations, as stated by the Court of Appeal, which had instead recognised the general extenuating circumstances. According to the second instance judges, in fact, the severity shown towards the two members of the chat 'the Scrocchio gang', had also been the result of conditioning due to the media clamour of the murder.

The Cassiotto, the Supreme Court of Cassation, deposited the sentence (34791) containing the motivations, with which on 9 April it upheld the public prosecutor's appeal against the decision of the Court of Appeal to grant general extenuating circumstances to the Bianchi brothers, who on the evening of 6 September 2020 beat Willy Monteiro Duarte to death in Colleferro, a town in the province of Rome.

The First Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court therefore opened the way for a bis appeal for the two limited to lowering the sentence from life imprisonment to 24 years. A new trial in which the defendants again risk life imprisonment.

The Supreme Court disassembled the thesis embraced by the appeal judges of a less 'intense' intent, in a murder resulting from a beating, to which the Whites had remained extraneous at the beginning. This element could not be used in their favour, the Court of Cassation explained, but if anything, had been the basis for the allegation of futile motives. The public prosecution, in the appeal upheld by the ermines, censures the sentence of the Court of Appeal for the part in which it refers to the media clamour 'as an element of attenuation of the depth of the negative personality of the two defendants, as portrayed by the media'. The second degree judges had also minimised the value of the chat 'the scrocchio gang'. in the impossibility of distinguishing 'fiction from reality, deviance from bad taste' . In addition, the Prosecutor had pointed out, the appeal judges 'seem to have ascribed to the Court of Assizes to have transposed as deterrent data some manifestations of behaviour of Gabriele Bianchi and Marco Bianchi of an uncertain nature, to be considered rather elements of a merely ethical or merely aesthetic nature'. But the Court of Cassation emphasises on this point the 'weakness' of the motivation of the Court of Appeal, which does not clarify which elements would have weighed in the judgement, despite their criminal irrelevance. In fact, the Supreme Court specifies that what influenced the no to mitigation was the brutal manner of the voluntary murder, carried out by striking a boy with a particularly slender body structure like Willy, repeatedly and violently in vital points.

The undeniable seriousness of the offence, committed against a defenceless young man, was combined with the negative assessment of the pronounced criminal capacity of the two defendants, "with pending charges for crimes of violence and convicted in second instance for dealing drugs, people known in their context as batterers". Two subjects with alarming personalities, with no work activity and yet with a high standard of living. The absence of any 'critical review of their very serious deviant actions' also plays a role.