A man is acquitted after spending 33 years in prison in the biggest miscarriage of justice in Italy

The Court of Appeal of Rome has acquitted a man who spent nearly 33 years in prison, where he was serving a life sentence for a triple homicide committed in 1991, after the charges against him were dropped “for not having committed the made”.

“It is the end of a nightmare,” said Beniamino Zuncheddu excitedly upon learning of the sentence, issued this Friday after several hours of deliberation by the judges, who accepted the requests of the Prosecutor’s Office, according to local media.

The former pastor, 58 years old, had been free since last November 25, when the same court suspended the sentence now ratified after several testimonies demonstrated that the investigation at the time of the events was manipulated by a police officer. .

Zuncheddu has become “the protagonist of the longest judicial error in republican history. Almost 33 years behind bars, 12,000 days of deprivation, suffering, pain, distance from his loved ones and his life,” said the organization Errori giudiziari, which deals with judicial errors and which was present in the appeal process.

The sentence was received with applause by those present in the courtroom of Rome, many of whom had arrived from the island of Sardinia, where on January 8, 1991, Gesuino Fadda, 56, was shot to death in a sheep pen; his son Giuseppe, 24; and his employee Ignazio Pusceddu, 55.

Fadda’s son-in-law, Luigi Pinna, 29, was seriously injured and became the sole witness to the so-called Sinnai massacre, the mountainous area of Cagliari province where the triple homicide took place.

During the trial, the attorney general, Francesco Piantoni, questioned the credibility of Pinna’s testimony, who at the time of the events accused Zuncheddu, who was already detained by the police although he always pleaded innocent.

And in one of the hearings Pinna confessed: 33 years ago, before “identifying the suspects, the police officer who was leading the investigation showed me Zuncheddu’s photo and told me that he was the culprit of the massacre.” “It was like that, I was wrong to listen to the wrong person.”

From the outset, investigators pointed to disputes between ranchers in the area as the cause of the homicide, in light of some incidents that occurred before the massacre, in particular the slaughter of some animals.

Zuncheddu, who was 27 years old, was arrested a few days later, when a judicial ordeal began for him that ended this Friday, after spending almost 33 years in prison.

“According to our data, in the last 32 years, the victims of judicial errors and unjust detention have been a total of 30,778. Every day in Italy three innocent people end up in prison, one every eight hours. And to compensate for it, the State has already spent 933 million euros, at a rate of 55 euros per minute,” said Errori giudiziari.