Carabinieri Officer Acquitted on Appeal in High-Profile Case

“The fact does not constitute a crime.” With this formula, the appellate judges in Rome acquitted, overturning the first-degree verdict, the Carabinieri marshal Fabio Manganaro, who was accused of blindfolding Christian Natale Hjorth, one of the Americans charged with the murder of Deputy Brigadier Mario Cerciello Rega. In the first degree, Manganaro had been sentenced to two months for the accusation of a measure of rigor not allowed by law. The photo of the young American with his eyes blindfolded and his head bowed went around the world. The young man had been stopped and taken to the barracks in Via In Selci in the hours following the tragic attack on Cerciello Rega, who was killed with 11 stab wounds in a street of the Capital in July 2019, along with Finnegan Lee Elder. In the reasons for the first-degree sentence, the single judge stated that the measure adopted by the non-commissioned officer “is not expressly provided for by the law” and therefore represents “an absolute anomaly” on which “there can be no doubt whatsoever”. The court added that it “cannot quite understand the relationship between the blindfolding of an individual and the need to calm him down, considering that, unlike what happens with birds of prey when they are deprived of visual stimuli, a human being just attacked in that way should, on the contrary, become much more agitated not even being able to see if someone is preparing to strike him and from where the threat is coming (and after all, Manganaro also declared that he had covered his eyes... to disorient him).” The second-degree sentence, however, dismantles this accusatory structure. The defendant's lawyer, Roberto De Vita, commented stating that this decision “restores that trust in justice that had been lost with the conclusions of the public prosecutor in the first degree and with the sentence of the single judge. On April 10th, meanwhile, the public prosecutor of the appellate court of the capital city asked for a sentence of 23 years and 9 months for Finnegan and 23 years for Hjorth, as part of the second appeal trial ordered by the Supreme Court. In particular, the supreme judges had annulled Elder's sentence to 24 years with a referral on the aggravating circumstances and on the existence of the crime of resisting a public official. For Hjorth, who had been sentenced to 22 years, the annulment with referral concerns the accusation of complicity in murder.