Fashion designer found hanged, ex-boyfriend Marco Venturi acquitted on appeal

The public prosecutor’s office had demanded 30 years in prison for negligent homicide, but the court acquitted him Marco Venturi Defendant in the case of the 37-year-old stylist and friend Carlotta Benusiglio, found hanging with a scarf from a tree in the gardens of Piazza Napoli in Milan on the night of May 31, 2016. The judges at the Milan Court of Appeal overturned the six-year first-degree prison sentence for “causing death” to “a consequence of another crime”, i.e. stalking behavior towards the partner. Venturi was acquitted of both the first-degree conviction and murder charges.

The first verdict was made in June 2022. The judge at the preliminary hearing, Raffaella Mascarino, decided in the shortened hearing that it was not a case of murder, but that it was a death, a suicide or a demonstrative act that ended in tragedy. It was caused by his ex-partner, who allegedly subdued Benusiglio for two years because of physical and psychological harassment and threats. In addition to the defense, the lawyer Andrea Belotti, who demanded acquittal, and the prosecutor Francesca Crupi also requested that Venturi be convicted of intentional homicide (she had demanded 30 years in the first degree). The public prosecutor’s office had repeated in the approximately 30-page appeal that the woman was strangled that night after another argument by her partner at the time, who then staged the suicide.

Venturi has passed as a witness over the years He is being investigated for incitement to suicide released pending murder charges. The public prosecutor’s office highlighted the man’s presence at the “crime scene” based on video recordings from the cameras, which were also processed in an advisory capacity by the civil party’s lawyers. And he remembered another argument between the two that evening, during which they had drunk heavily, and the man’s contradictory versions. Three measures weigh on the case (investigating judge, appeal and cassation), with which the request for arrest for murder was rejected and a forensic medical report that determined that it was a case of suicide. In addition, a final assessment was made in which an IT expert, after examining a few minutes of film from one of the cameras on the pitch, concluded that a dark spot was not the shadow of a human silhouette, but an “artifact due to The compression of “pixels in images”.

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