Piazza San Carlo, sentence confirmed for former mayor Chiara Appendino
The verdict of the Court of Appeal was confirmed with a sentence of one year, five months and 23 days imprisonment for the former mayor and the former chief of staff
Key points
The Court of Cassation has rejected theappeal of the former mayor of Turin Chiara Appendino and former chief of staff Paolo Giordana to revise downwards the sentence to one year, five months and 23 days imprisonment for disaster, murder and multiple injuries, all of which were negligent. A sentence that had been recalculated - compared to 18 months - in January 2025 by the Turin Court of Appeal for the facts of Piazza San Carlo, which occurred on 3 June 2017 during the screening of the Champions League final Juventus-Real Madrid when a robbery attempt by some young people, later identified and convicted, ended up generating panic among the crowd, with a toll of more than 1.700 injured and two people dead.
The size of the sentence had been recalculated in consideration of theresignation of complaint by some offended parties, injured that night, which had occurred during the various trial stages. The request to quantify the sentence downwards again had come from the Supreme Court, which, on 17 June last, had ordered an appeal-bis limited to a recalculation linked to the fact that the second-degree judges in Turin, despite having discharged the defendant from the charge of wounding ten people, "had not reduced the sentence, thus incurring in a clear violation of the prohibition of reformatio in peius". For the rest, the Court of Cassation had confirmed liability for all charges.
The recalculation of the Court of Appeal
The judges of legitimacy, in rejecting the appeal, therefore endorsed the sentence of the Court of Appeal, which had left unchanged the basic sentence, set at two years and three months imprisonment, with reference to the crime of culpable disaster; the reduction for the general extenuating circumstances to the extent of one third, leading to a reduction of the basic sentence to one year and six months imprisonment; the increase of six months imprisonment for the two culpable murders and the reduction of one third for the ritual. On the other hand, the segment on the punishment increase for the offence of culpable wounding, which was reduced from three months' imprisonment to two months and twenty days' imprisonment, was modified. This was because the sentence increase for culpable injuries - set in the first instance by having one hundred and thirty-seven offended persons - had remained unchanged on appeal despite the intervening withdrawal of the complaint by ten of the specified offended persons. And it had been subject to annulment with reference by the Court of Cassation.
