The recent decision by Italy’s Court of Cassation (Corte di Cassazione) in case number 27115/2024 has sparked numerous reactions due to its consideration of the COVID-19 pandemic as a potential extenuating circumstance in a femicide case. This crime, which garnered significant media attention in Italian society, involved a perpetrator who was initially sentenced to life imprisonment for aggravated murder by a first-instance court as well as an intermediate appeals court.

The facts of the case the Italian courts dealt with pertain to the murder of medical student Lorena Quaranta by her boyfriend Antonio De Pace, a nurse, that took place in March 2020. The murderer strangled the victim in Furci Siculo, Messina, Sicily. After committing the crime, he attempted suicide twice and then alerted the police. De Pace had told the police and investigators that he had done the act because Quaranta had given him coronavirus. The victim had been suffering from a sore throat for a week, which the perpetrator was convinced was a symptom of Covid.

The Court of Cassation overturned the life sentence due to the failure of lower courts to recognize pandemic-related stress as a potential mitigating factor for the perpetrator. The case will now be reevaluated with the possibility of a reduced sentence, as the consideration of general mitigating circumstances will take place in favor of the perpetrator. According to Italy’s highest court, as quoted by Decrypto, “[A]t a dramatic historical juncture, in which the whole of humanity was called upon practically overnight to resist a hitherto unknown, invasive and apparently unstoppable danger,” the perpetrator “experienced a psychological discomfort that gradually evolved into anxiety and, therefore, distress.”  “[T]he sentence does not take into account the cause that provoked the agitated condition,” this situation would also have “hindered the prompt activation of those psychological, affective, relational, and sanitary safeguards aimed at mitigating the effects and preventing their escalation.”  Furthermore, the court decided that the judges who gave the life term “did not examine whether the specific nature of the situation, the COVID period and the difficulty in remedying it, constituted factors affecting the extent of criminal liability.”

Under Italian Law, there are provisions about common extenuating circumstances (Article 62, Circostanze attenuanti comuni) and also about general extenuating circumstances (Article 62bis, Circostanze attenuanti generiche), giving judges the right to take into account any circumstances, including than those listed in article 62, that justify a diminution of the sentece. The Court of Cassation refers in this case to the general extenuating factors of Article 62bis, stating that the previous courts failed to consider the pandemic as one of them.

There are two different starting points for critically reviewing the decision of the court. One revolves around the argument presented by the perpetrator that he had killed the victim because she had given him (or he thought she had given him) the coronavirus. The question is whether the pandemic could have influenced the perpetrator in his decision to commit murder. At the time of the murder, the world was grappling with a new reality. Death dominated the news, with videos highlighting Italy showing military convoys transporting coffins. Governments implemented unprecedented lockdowns and measures to curb the spread of the virus. Alongside COVID-19 posing a threat of death, there was also a contagion of fear spreading in our societies, leading to violence. Fear and the survival instinct can drive humans to react in unimaginable ways, even pushing them to commit acts of violence, cruelty, and hostility toward others. During crises—the pandemic being a significant one—people tend to seek scapegoats to blame for the situation. The virus was an invisible menace and perceived as an “evil” while individuals who were infected or capable of transmitting the virus were visible targets of rage. Contracting SARS-CoV-2 could have been viewed as a potential death sentence at that time, and those seen as “spreading the virus” were blamed for it. This explains why there were numerous incidents of violence against Asians or individuals of Asian descent who were unjustly attacked as being responsible for the pandemic.

Although the psychological, sociological, and criminological comprehension of the dynamics of fear and the survival instinct during the pandemic provides useful general insight into human behaviour, it cannot constitute the basis for mitigating factors in criminal cases, like the murder of Lorena Quaranta. The pandemic as a mitigating factor is overly vague, plus it accepts as a reason for a shorter sentence the vilification of another person due to stressful circumstances. If the period of COVID-19 is considered by courts to be an extenuating circumstance in murder, then also war could serve as an extenuating circumstance for those who commit war crimes, including murder, and rape, because war undeniably causes stress. Next, unemployment, the financial crisis, and international conflicts could follow. Should courts view unemployment and the stress it causes as a mitigating factor if someone who cannot find a job and is tormented by financial problems kills another person, maybe an immigrant who has managed to land a job while “natives” cannot? The slippery slope is evident. It would have been a completely different matter if the perpetrator had proven he was facing specific mental health problems due to the pandemic conditions or SARS-CoV-2 itself, causing a lapse of judgment and affecting his criminal liability. And even then the lower courts should have distinguished whether the pandemic as an environmental situation represented an efficient cause or only an epiphenomenon for the violent behavior. However, in De Pace’s case, a psychiatric consultant is reported to have found a personality prone to violence but no signs of psychosis.

The second starting point to review the Court of Cassation’s ruling concerns its lack of understanding of the phenomenon of femicide. It is an example of the way the justice mechanism in many countries often overlooks the influence of patriarchy as a pivotal parameter. When courts accept the pandemic as a mitigating factor, deciding that stress could be blamed for femicide, they ignore the deep roots of the problem. Femicide perpetrators do not kill their victims because they are stressed. They kill them because there has been a whole male culture forged for thousands of years now according to which women belong to dominant males who can do with them whatever they want to, even take their lives. Violent attitudes, controlling females and exercising power (physical or psychological) over them are models of male behavior still surviving in our times. The Court of Cassation’s decision turns a blind eye to the expression of patriarchy by violent males and creates a dangerous precedent, according to which whatever problematic and critical situation exists in society could serve in the future as an extenuating factor when sentencing perpetrators of domestic violence crimes and femicide. So again, conditions like unemployment or even a low wage could be presented by a defendant as extenuating circumstances since they created stress for him, and he killed his wife or girlfriend during, for example, a quarrel about her spending too much money.

The Covid-19 pandemic was also a pandemic of violence against women. In Italy, but also in other countries all over the world, there was a rise in domestic violence incidents, with stress actually affecting the women who had to cope with the fear of infection, the fear of abuse and the uncertainty about the operation of local services that could assist them when in danger. To recognize the stress of the pandemic as a factor that could benefit the abuser or murderer in court is to distort reality and to provide indirect justification for the violent victimization of women.

Dr. Maria Alvanou, (International Research Doctorate in Criminology- University of Trento, Italy), is a defense lawyer and a member of the Working Group “Covid-19 and Viral Violence” that has received support from the National Science Foundation-funded Social Science Extreme Events Research (SSEER) network and the CONVERGE facility at the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado Boulder (NSF Award #1841338). Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF, SSEER, or CONVERGE.