La Spezia – The Court of Appeal of Genoa “does not properly explain” why the first instance sentence would be wrong. The Supreme Court uses very harsh terminology: the motivation is “apparent, assertive, manifestly illogical, apodictic and unreasonable”. Then on the phone call of 21 January 2016 – which according to prosecutors and carabinieri would be the main test in which Marzia Corini tells a friend that she had anticipated, with a lethal dosage of a powerful sedative, Midazolam, the death of her brother seriously ill with cancer – the Roman judges criticize their colleagues from the Ligurian capital, believing that they did not deal with “the coherent development of the conversation between the two interviewees”. They weigh like rocks the words put in black and white by the Supreme Court to annul the verdict with which in May 2022 the Court of Appeal of Genoa had acquitted Marzia Corini, an anesthetist involved in numerous humanitarian missions on trial because she was suspected of having anticipated, perhaps by weeks, the death of her brother Marco Valerio, lawyer of singers, footballers and top management of the police at the G8 trial in Genoa.
The sequence
The doctor Corini finds herself at the center of one of the most controversial mysteries of recent years: the lawyer Corini dies on 25 September 2015 in her home in Ameglia and at first everyone thinks that the death was caused by the worsening of the disease. But in February 2016 the unforeseeable happened: her sister was arrested (under house arrest) on charges of voluntary homicide and forgery of a will. This is a circumstantial investigation, therefore in the balance by definition. Corini's body was cremated, but the Prosecutor's Office of La Spezia obtained the precautionary measure mainly thanks to an intercepted phone call in which the woman confided to a friend that her brother had died because she had “sedated” him.
Again: “No, he would never have died either that day, or the next day, or after a week.” The motive? The Assize Court of La Spezia condemned the anesthetist, believing that the motive would have been twofold: he did not want to see his brother suffer, but there was also the economic aspect of him. Corini dies on September 25th on a day when he had an appointment with a notary. And perhaps, according to the prosecution's theory, Marzia feared that the will would be discussed again for the umpteenth time. However, the Genoa Court of Appeal debunks these theories and even the Attorney General Roberto Aniello himself considers only the “compassionate” motive credible.
Doctor Corini is acquitted. The judges of second instance sentenced her only for the second hypothesis of falsification of her will, to 5 months (which in the meantime had become definitive). In April 2023, however, the Supreme Court puts everything back into play: cancels the acquittal and asks the Court of Appeal of Milan (Genoa has a single section) to rule again on the merits of the case. In recent days, the reasons for a sentence have emerged which, as mentioned, uses very harsh terminology to dismantle the second degree verdict.
The queen test
The Supreme Court is clear on the phone call of 21 January 2016 in which the accused confided in her friend: it refers to the detailed reasoning of the La Spezia Assize Court which explains how and why the phone call contained «a clear confession of the 'murder, spontaneous confession and not induced by anyone, nor mediated by the words of third parties and expressed in a fluid and flowing manner and with terms with a unique meaning”. On the other hand, the judges of second instance would have denied the nature of confessions to these statements, defining them as “words that flowed without control and without logic, emerging from the depths of thoughts tangled with pain”, thus arriving at the conclusion that the self-declaration of the accused would not have found any confirmation. These statements, however, according to the Court of Cassation, would be illogical because the judges of Appeal would have given up “on dealing with the coherent development of the conversation between the two interviewees, indicated in detail in the first degree sentence, as well as with the statement, reiterated several times from Marzia Corini, that her brother had died because she had sedated him.” Again according to the Roman judges, it emerges from the conversation that it is Corini herself who introduces the topic of sedation, asking her friend if she understood that that day «Marco would not have died if she had not sedated him and, having received a negative response, she reiterates, with an absolutely clear statement: “He died because I sedated him”». It therefore appears completely “unreasonable”, again according to the reasoning of the Court of Cassation, to believe that the “clear and consequential words reported by the accused”, even in the face of questions from her friend, have “flowed out without control and logic”.
Still: seems “illogical” believe that the sense of guilt would have led Marzia Corini to attribute responsibility for the murder of her brother due to an unconscious mechanism of self-harm. The Capitoline magistrates also noted that the appeal sentence would not have provided any justification “of the elements that the first degree sentence had placed in support of the extrajudicial confession”. The Court of Cassation thus lists the declarations of the nurse who had visited Corini on the day of his death, of his live-in girlfriend Isabò Barrack and of the treating oncologists: one of the latter had visited the patient on 23 September and had given him a few more months of life
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