No extenuating circumstances. For Massimo Bianco, a 49-year-old security guard who shot his wife to death, the sentence is life imprisonment.

The court of Assize of Turin does not accept the line of the prosecutor, who had asked for 30 years in prison, and accepts that of the lawyer Stefano La Notte, civil party on behalf of the couple's two children: punish with the maximum penalty a defendant who he had acted as a result of "a male chauvinist and savage culture", unable to accept the idea that a woman can be separated from her husband. Angela Dargenio, 48, died on 7 May 2021 in the building in Corso Novara where Massimo, who she had left a few months ago, also lived in a different apartment.

"She was punished for having had the audacity to want to be free", said the prosecutor Francesca Traverso, adding however that the accused, although "moved by an archaic and retrograde mentality", according to the code deserved the equivalence of general extenuating circumstances compared to aggravating circumstances: after the shooting he had awaited the arrival of the police, he had confessed, he had asked for forgiveness.

But the lawyer La Notte did not hide his opposition. "It was - he argued - a bestial crime. He waited for the woman to come home and went to meet her on the stairs shooting 8 times. The last one in the head. The coup de grace. This was not a moment of madness. It was not the dramatic ending of a quarrel. It was the product of a country attitude, of something that a part of Italy has not yet digested: we know that even the victim's mother said that 'a tumor is better than a separated daughter '".

Bianco described as a man "jealous, possessive, who disrespected his wife and insulted her only because she greeted the acquaintances he passed in the street".

(Unioneonline / L)

© Riproduzione riservata