He confessed to suffocating his sick elderly mother in his sleep. The judge of the Asti court acquitted him. Gianni Ghiotti, 53, a worker from Piovà Massaia, sat down in September last year in the office of the carabinieri in his country. “I have a story to tell,” he said and, to everyone’s surprise, he recounted how he had suffocated his 92-year-old gravely ill mother three years earlier.
When the woman died no one had suspected that the old woman might not have died of natural causes, there was a funeral and the body of the pensioner had been buried in the city cemetery. That secret, however, had been too heavy for Ghiotti who, three years later, had decided to confess everything. If he hadn’t, he probably would never have been discovered.
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Assisted by his lawyer Marco Dapino he chose the shortened procedure (a choice still possible at the time of the facts) and in the courtroom, in front of the investigating judge Federico Belli and prosecutor Gabriele Fiz, he told his story. “It was a very painful hearing – says the lawyer – This man suffered for what had happened but his was not a crime but an act of love with which he sacrificed himself, his serenity and his freedom. for a crime involving life imprisonment. I am very satisfied for him with the outcome of the process “.
Ghiotti had explained that he had killed his mother for his own request: the woman suffered greatly from osteoporosis that had struck her and had caused her to fracture her femur four times in just one year. Doctors had operated on her but also told her that they could not repair other fractures because the bones would not be strong enough to hold prostheses and pins.
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At 92, after a past life to work in the countryside, she found herself forced into the home, disabled, assisted by her son who had dedicated his whole life to his family, first taking care of his father who had suffered a stroke and then of his mother. Ghiotti’s lawyer had asked for his acquittal or, alternatively, the request to recognize the fact as “murder of the consenting party”. The prosecutor had instead asked for a sentence of seven and a half years, recognizing with such a low sentence already many extenuating circumstances.
The judge, who yesterday read the sentence in court in Asti, decided to acquit the man “because the fact does not exist”. In ninety days the reasons for the sentence will be filed. Ghiotti, who had spent a period under house arrest, returned free.