Tortora, Gulotta, Zuncheddu and the others: here is who got compensation for the miscarriage of justice

Angelo Massaro has been in prison 21 years because of a consonant. A misinterpreted dialect word cost him a 30-year sentence. Arrested on 15 May 1996 for a crime he never committed, he was only released from prison, after a retrial, declared innocent, in 2017, 21 years later. At the time of his arrest, he was at home with his wife and children, one aged two and a half years and the other 45 days old. The accusation is that he killed and disappeared a friend of his who had disappeared a few days earlier. The key to the charge is a phone call to his wife one morning in which, while pulling a bobcat for a construction job, he tells his wife that he is carrying a 'muers', a dead weight, meaning that tool. Massaro then ends up in prison due to an incorrectly transcribed interception, because the investigators understand from the interception: 'muert', dead. Sentenced in 1997 to 30 years imprisonment for the murder, he was acquitted 20 years later. Massaro's human odyssey is recounted in a docu-film, 'Dead Weight', by journalists Benedetto Lattanzi and Valentino Maimone, founders of errorigiudiziari.com and director Francesco Del Grosso.

Maurizio Bova was found innocent after being sentenced to life imprisonment and serving almost 20 years: exactly 19 years, seven months and 20 days behind bars. What brought him to prison were very serious charges: murder and attempted murder. Maurizio Bova, from Somma Vesuviana, was wrongly convicted in 1997 for the murder of boss Antonio Ferrara and for the attempted murder of Domenico Ferrara, which took place in 1994. He obtained compensation of 2 million 149 thousand euro, as reparation for the miscarriage of justice, decided by the Court of Appeal of Perugia. In the end, a collaborator of justice, initially accused in conspiracy with Bova, later self-accused of the crimes. A very long judicial process, which went from a life sentence by the Court of Assizes of Appeal of Naples in 1997, to the inadmissibility of the revision of the trial by the Court of Appeal of Rome in 2011, to the annulment of the decision of the Court of Appeal of Rome by the Court of Cassation in 2012. Then the acquittal by the Court of Appeal of Perugia in 2014, the claim for compensation filed again in Perugia at the end of 2014 until the council chamber of the judges in May 2015 when the decision was filed.

Daniele Barillà's only crime was driving an amaranth-coloured Fiat Tipo similar to that of a cocaine trafficker whom the Carabinieri were tailing. The police, during an anti-drug operation, mistook him for the real culprit. Despite the obvious inconsistencies, Barillà, who had opened a company that assembled electric cables for scooters and had 15 employees, was sentenced to 15 years imprisonment. Daniele's story, contained in the book 'The Wrong Man. Il caso Barillà' and the RAI fiction of the same name, starts on the evening of 13 February 1992. The young Lombard entrepreneur climbs into the Tipo amaranto to go on a date with his girlfriend in Nova Milanese. This happens while the Carabinieri of the Genoa Ros are chasing a load of cocaine, hidden on a blue Fiat Uno escorted by an amaranth Tipo. At the outskirts of Nova Milanese, the traffickers' Tipo pulls away. The soldiers stop the Uno with 50 kilos of cocaine and block Barillà's Tipo a few metres away. Daniele was sentenced to 15 years in prison, accused of being a leading figure in the Milanese mala. The entrepreneur loses his company, his girlfriend. The father died of a broken heart. In 2000, after seven and a half years in prison, he was acquitted. The case was reopened in 1997, following the arrest of a lieutenant-colonel of the Ros in Liguria and head of the Genoese Dia, since his team had carried out Barillà's arrest. The soldier was accused of using illegal methods to gain the trust of 'confidants', including the use of missing drug consignments as a means of exchange. Barillà was released from prison on 12 July 1999 and acquitted on 17 July 2000 for not having committed the crime. In 2001, he made a request for compensation of 12 billion old lire. Compensation that was initially denied, but in 2007 a maxi-compensation of around three million euro was established. A total of EUR 2,759,743.72, a figure that with interest and legal fees exceeds three million.

Giuseppe Lastella, from Bari, spent eleven years behind bars accused of murder. It was on 2 April 1990 when, from hospital, a convicted criminal, before dying, accused the group that had beaten him to death in an ambush on the Salerno-Reggio Calabria, junction for Tarsia. Among them, he ranted, was the co-owner of a car showroom who, according to the investigators, was Giuseppe Lastella. The Cosenza Assize Court decided for acquittal. But then the Catanzaro Court of Appeal sentenced him to 30 years in prison. On 20 December 2001, his lawyers, thanks to new evidence consisting of unpublished testimonies, asked the Catanzaro Court of Appeal to review the trial, which was rejected. Yet another appeal to the Court of Cassation, where the request was granted with the instruction of a new trial in Salerno. And on 16 November 2004, the acquittal verdict. Not enough. The Prosecutor General's Office appealed the sentence in the Court of Cassation, but the Supreme Court rejected the appeal and established once and for all that Lastella was innocent. Only in 2012, after having obtained an initial sum of about EUR 600,000, did he receive a supplement that brought the final amount of compensation to EUR 1.5 million.

Accused of a murder he never committed, Giuseppe Giuliana spent 5 years and 29 days in prison. To this must be added 2 years, 5 months and 4 days spent with an obligation to stay and a travel ban. The farm labourer, originally from Canicattì (Agrigento), who had always declared his innocence, had been accused of killing a businessman in Serradifalco (Caltanissetta). He was found guilty at first instance by the Caltanissetta Assize Court, on 4 July 1997. Then the sentence was also confirmed by the Caltanissetta Court of Assizes of Appeal, which sentenced him to 19 years imprisonment for murder, possession and carrying of firearms, and aggravated robbery. The same verdict, in 2000, was also handed down by the Court of Cassation. On 6 December 2014, the revision trial ended with an acquittal by the Catania Court of Appeal. Giuseppe Giuliana filed a claim for compensation for the moral and existential damage he suffered during his years in prison. And on 15 June 2015, the Catania Court of Appeal accepted it. The compensation obtained from the State amounted to 500,000 euros.

Saverio De Sario is a Sardinian lorry driver, who had moved to Brescia with his wife and two children. He was accused of abusing his children, following his wife's complaint. The woman had accused him by bringing the children's testimonies to court. In September 2015, the children overturned the accusations, admitting that the incident was not true, but that their mother had persuaded them to make those statements. At the end of the revision process, the Court of Appeal of Perugia cancelled the man's eleven-year sentence for sexually abusing the two children: the man was acquitted because the fact did not exist and the judges ordered his immediate release. De Sario's lawyer had asked for EUR 1.5 million as compensation for the damage suffered. But the judges of the Court of Appeal of Perugia set the compensation at EUR 400,000: more than EUR 250,000 for the deprivation of personal freedom during the 1,068 days he spent in prison as an innocent man, plus an 'extra' 40% for the infamous accusations he had suffered.

Beniamino Zuncheddu is a former Sardinian shepherd: almost 33 years in prison as an innocent man, sentenced to life imprisonment for the massacre in Sinnai, Sardinia, where three Sardinian shepherds were killed in 1991. The sole survivor pointed to Zuncheddu as the culprit, after the policeman Mario Uda had shown him a photo of Zuncheddu in advance, indicating that he was already guilty. A fact proven in the revision trial that established that an innocent man had been convicted for that massacre. Sentenced to life imprisonment, he spent just under 33 years in prison before the Rome Court of Appeal acquitted him in January 2024. The review was possible thanks to the efforts of a young Sardinian lawyer, Mauro Trogu, and the then prosecutor Francesca Nanni, who signed the review request with the lawyer. The wiretaps ordered proved Beniamino's innocence and proved the inconsistency of the accusatory castle. An affair brought to the media limelight by Irene Testa, guarantor of prisoners in Sardinia and treasurer of the Radical Party. The Zuncheddu case is, to date, the most serious miscarriage of justice ever recognised in Italy in terms of length of detention. Lawyer Mauro Trogu, together with a pool of experts, is preparing the request for state compensation that will be presented to the Court of Appeal in Rome. For the amount of compensation, Trogu explains, 'one cannot make a purely arithmetical calculation. It is necessary to consider the convicted person who has suffered the miscarriage of justice in its entirety, as a person who has human, family, and affective relationships that are crushed or in any case limited by the period of imprisonment. One must consider the individual as a worker who loses his income capacity. He must also be considered from a purely moral and individual point of view, therefore from the point of view of the physical and psychic suffering that detention causes him. Because we know that detention causes conditions of sensory deprivation that are physically and psychologically painful. All these factors enter into the calculation of compensation'. Beniamino meanwhile waits for justice to be done.