Can the stress caused by Covid “attenuate” the femicide of one’s partner? Apparently yes. The reasons with which the Court of Cassation annulled with referral, limited to the applicability of generic mitigating circumstances, the life sentence for the Calabrian nurse Antonio De Pace for the killing of Lorena Quaranta, have been causing discussion in the last few hours. the medical student originally from Agrigento strangled to death in the villa in Furci Siculo on the night of March 31, 2020 by her confessed partner.

Quaranta Murder: The Court of Cassation’s Decision

For the Court of Cassation the judges of merit should have better verified whether “the specificity of the context can, and to what extent, be ascribed to the defendant” for “not having effectively attempted to counteract the state of anguish to which he was prey” or whether “the source of the discomfort, evidently represented by the arrival of the pandemic emergency, with all that it has determined in the life of each person and, therefore, also of the protagonists of the affair, and, even more, the contingent difficulty of remedying it, constitute factors affecting the measure of criminal liability”. The Covid stress claimed by the murderer’s defense, in short, could represent the mitigating circumstance that had been denied by the Court of Assizes of Reggio Calabria to which the Cassation refers, limited to the applicability of generic mitigating circumstances which, if recognized, would effectively cancel the life sentence.

Nurses and doctors: the disparities

Before commenting on the Supreme Court ruling, let’s clarify a couple of points: Lorena was about to graduate in Medicine, Antonio was a nurse. This disparity of roles in the same field – the health sector -, in a cultural context in which male-female hierarchies are often still problematic, could have influenced the story, so much so that Lorena’s father explained how De Pace had “an inferiority complex towards my daughter. She had almost graduated in medicine, he was specializing in Nursing Sciences and Lorena had helped him not to stop and to enter Dentistry”. And she, the woman, as often happens in these cases, took on this state of inferiority in her partner: “I don’t care if you’re a nurse or a doctor – Lorena wrote to her boyfriend in 2019, well before the arrival of Covid -. I prefer to say with dignity that I’m the girlfriend of a nurse who behaves like a man and not of a rude doctor. You fill my head so much with the fact that you want to be on my level and then you behave like an ignorant villager who bangs on the glass”.

Stress “as a trigger”

It should also be emphasized that the murder occurred just 23 days after the start of the very first lockdown. The Court of Cassation therefore asks for an investigation to understand whether the nurse, in a handful of days, could have accumulated such a stress load that it led to the strangulation of his own girlfriend. If this were the case, this stress would be considered as a mitigating factor and the life sentence would be cancelled. “If every time a femicide occurs we have to consider the emotional state of the person who committed such a brutal crime, then it means that everything can be justified, any murder. A dangerous orientation that puts the protection of women at risk and does not provide justice. In that period (that of Covid, ed.) we have all been stressed, but that does not authorize strangulation”, he commented the lawyer Cettina La Torre, who constituted themselves as civil party as an anti-violence center By your side. The lawyer hit the nail on the head: who among us wasn’t struck by stress during the first lockdown? Some found themselves without a job, some on the contrary with even more work and maybe their children at home from school with no idea how to manage it all. Some lost a relative or a friend, some found themselves intubated, some had to close their business, some couldn’t leave the house for months and months because they were too fragile to risk contagion, some couldn’t see their family for months. The list could go on and on, and certainly healthcare workers – including nurses like Antonio – were among those most affected by stress during that period.

Femicide: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

So what? How can you relate stress to the killing of your partner, using it as a mitigating factor, and creating a huge precedent? Attorney La Torre is right: if we consider the emotional state of the murderer when establishing a fair sentence, then we can justify everything. The femicide of Giulia Cecchettin? Filippo was certainly stressed by the fact that his ex-girlfriend, unlike him, had graduated and decided to continue her life without him. The femicide of Giulia Tramontano? Who could complain of more stress than her murderous boyfriend Alessandro Impagnatiello, forced to manage not one, but two romantic relationships in parallel, and who was about to see his life turned upside down by the arrival of a child?

If we are stressed, does everything become permissible, or at least “less serious”, even murder? Are these the bases on which we want to start fighting against machismo and patriarchy and building a different culture? What is the point of plastering cities with posters with anti-violence slogans, organizing protest marches and self-defense courses, increase the penalties and create the Red Code, encourage more and more women to report and then find themselves faced with sentences like this? In this way, on feminicides, we continue to take one step forward and two steps back. And in this way, as Lorena’s father rightly said, we continue to kill the victims twice.