The Court of Appeal of Rome has acquitted a man who spent almost 33 years in prison, where he was serving a life sentence for a triple homicide committed in 1991, after the charges against him were dropped “for not having committed the made”.
“It is the end of a nightmare,” Beniamino Zuncheddu said emotionally upon learning of the sentence, issued last night after several hours of deliberation by the judges, who accepted the requests of the Prosecutor’s Office, local media reported.
The former pastor, 58 years old, had been free since last November 25, when the same court suspended the sentence now ratified after several testimonies demonstrated that the investigation at the time of the events was manipulated by a police officer. .
Zuncheddu has become “the protagonist of the longest judicial error in republican history. Almost 33 years behind bars, 12,000 days of deprivation, suffering, pain, distance from his loved ones and his life,” the organization said. Errorigiudiziari.com (Erroresjudiciales.com), which deals with judicial errors and was present in the appeal process.
The sentence was received with applause by those present in the courtroom of Rome, many of whom had arrived from the island of Sardinia (south), where on January 8, 1991, Gesuino Fadda, 56, was shot to death in a sheep pen. ; his son Giuseppe, 24; and his employee Ignazio Pusceddu, 55.
Fadda’s son-in-law, Luigi Pinna, 29, was seriously injured and became the only witness to the so-called Sinnai massacre, the mountainous area of ??the province of Cagliari where the triple homicide took place.
During the trial, the attorney general, Francesco Piantoni, questioned the credibility of Pinna’s testimony, who at the time of the events accused Zuncheddu, who was already detained by the police although he always declared himself innocent.
And in one of the hearings Pinna confessed: 33 years ago, before “identifying the suspects, the police officer who was leading the investigation showed me Zuncheddu’s photo and told me that he was the culprit of the massacre. It was like this: I was wrong to listen to the wrong person.
Investigators pointed from the first moment as the cause of the homicide to disputes between ranchers in the area, in light of some incidents that occurred before the slaughter, in particular the slaughter of some animals, as well as disputes between ranchers.
Zuncheddu, who was 27 years old, was arrested a few days later, when a judicial ordeal began for him that ended last night, after spending almost 33 years in prison.
“According to our data, in the last 32 years, the victims of judicial errors and unjust detention have been a total of 30,778. Every day in Italy 3 innocent people end up in prison, one every 8 hours. And to compensate them, the State already has spent 933 million euros, at a rate of 55 euros per minute,” said Errorigiudiziari.com.