Dead patients in the ward, former nurse Daniela Poggiali acquitted
The former nurse Daniela Poggiali she can leave prison as a free woman: all the murder charges presented on appeal, presented for the second time within four years, are dropped. “I’m happy, it could only go like this’“, commented the 49-year-old defendant immediately approached in court by her sister and brother-in-law, exulting for this new and very important judicial victory for her.
The Court of Assizes of Appeal of Bologna, president Stefano Valenti, was called to express himself ‘in one fell swoop’ on two similar cases, which however have had different development times over the years. For the first it was a rare ‘appeal ter’ and the Attorney General today reiterated with the substitute pg Luciana Cicerchia the request to confirm the life sentence for the murder of the 78-year-old Rosa Calderoni, according to the accusation made to die with a ‘ potassium injection a few hours after admission, on 8 April 2014 at the ‘Umberto I’ hospital in Lugo. The second trend instead saw Poggiali on trial for the murder of another elderly patient, the 94-year-old Massimo Montanari, who died on 12 March 2014, also in Lugo.
In the first instance, for this, had been sentenced to 30 years and placed in custody in prison, arrested on the eve of Christmas 2020. Today’s decisions, both with the formula “because the fact does not exist”, are an important moment, but not the definitive one because appeals to the Supreme Court are always possible which, if there are any, could extend further an infinite judicial process. The trial began in October 2014, when Poggiali was arrested for the Calderoni case.
Sentenced in first instance to life imprisonment in Ravenna, the nurse had spent over a thousand days in prison to be released only after the first acquittal, on 7 July 2017 “because the fact does not exist by the Court of Assizes of Appeal of Bologna, on the basis of an expert opinion judged favorable to the accused because it endorsed the possibility of the patient’s death due to natural causes.
There subsequent decision of the Supreme Court, the following year, to order a new appeal process in Bologna did not change the decision of the new judges, who confirmed the formula “the fact does not exist” to acquit the woman again in 2019. The prosecutor’s insistence on challenging this decision too, however, was further heard by the Supreme Court, which once again had postponed the trial. In the meantime, the former nurse was sentenced in abbreviated form in Ravenna also for the case of Montanari, who died the night before the announced resignation.
And after this sentence, a new precautionary detention measure was ordered in prison, carried out, in fact, on Christmas Eve 2020. Appeal ter on Calderoni’s death, which went hand in hand with the other trial, saw new reports available, including a statistical-forensic study from which it emerged that in the in the shifts in which the defendant was on duty, the mortality rate of the patients was “three to five times the average of the other nurses”. But the accusation against her “is something crazy” Poggiali said today in spontaneous statements before the parties took the floor. His defenders, lawyers Lorenzo Valgimigli and Gaetano Insolera, spoke for about two hours.
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