Cassation confirms 24 year sentence for Alessia Pifferi for the death of her daughter Diana

Alessia Pifferi, even "after the discovery of the little girl's body", maintained "lucid behavior in modifying the crime scene and, in part, in concealing traces of the crime". However, in balancing the sentence, as the Milanese appeal judges did, it is necessary to consider her "extreme emotional fragility", the fact that she "grew up in an unsuitable environment of which there were traces already in her school career", her "dramatic history" on an "affective level", the "sense of loneliness" and the "affective dependence on men" which "led her to sacrifice her daughter". The Supreme Court wrote this in the reasons for the sentence with which, last June 25, it made the 24-year prison sentence definitive for the 41-year-old for the death of her daughter Diana in July 2022. Less than a year and a half old, she was abandoned by her mother alone at home for almost six days, while she was with her then partner, and died of starvation.

The Supreme Court, rejecting the appeals of the defense and the Milanese Attorney General's Office, effectively confirmed the accusation of voluntary homicide and the woman's capacity to intend and will, as they had been reconstructed in the investigations of the Police and the prosecutor Francesco De Tommasi. On the other hand, however, it also maintained the generic mitigating circumstances granted to the accused, defended in the Court of Cassation by the lawyer Cristian Scaramozzino, in the second degree trial which had canceled the first degree life sentence.

"Emotional fragility" and the accused's personal history are the points for which the stoats confirmed the mitigating circumstances.

Not, however, for that "suffering" determined by the "media outcry" indicated by the Milanese Court of Appeal, because it is a "personal intuition" which "has no legal basis", as also highlighted by the Milanese Attorney General's Office. Alessia Pifferi's mother and sister, Diana's grandmother and aunt respectively, were civil parties in the trial, with the lawyer Emanuele De Mitri.

The first criminal section of the Supreme Court (president Monica Boni, rapporteur Carmine Russo) acknowledges, as two expert reports had already done in the trials, that the woman did not have any mental defect: there was no "invincible pathological impulse that could have forced her to abandon the child". What was documented, we read in the reasons, "only an emotional fragility of the accused which pushed her to continually seek the company of a man who desired her". He was, however, capable of "solving problems and making decisions." In essence, nothing counts, not even that "low intelligence quotient" which was "found following the outcome of the test administered to her in prison".