Marco Cappato and Mina Welby, treasurer and co-president, respectively, of the Luca Coscioni Association, appear today before the Massa Assize Court (Massa Carrara). They will be charged with instigation or aiding and abetting suicide in relation to the assisted suicide death of Davide Trentini, who had suffered from multiple sclerosis since 1993, in Switzerland on April 13, 2017. Trentini was 53 years old and his life, marked by progressively declining health, had become an ordeal. For this reason he first contacted Marco Cappato and then Mina Welby, to find out how to access voluntary death in Switzerland. After several meetings and after Mina's help in unblocking some bureaucratic procedures - also acting as an interpreter in German with the same Swiss clinic - Davide received the so-called green light. In a farewell message, which he wanted to leave through the Luca Coscioni association to explain and make public his decision, Trentini said: "Enough pain. The main thing is the pain, you have to focus on the word pain. Everything else is extra.” So on April 13, 2017, in a clinic in Basel, accompanied by Mina Welby, he chose euthanasia, through assisted suicide. Specifically, it is a form of euthanasia, legal in Switzerland, where following a strictly regulated process, and under medical supervision, the person who requests it autonomously administers the drug to himself, without the intervention of third parties. The next day Mina Welby, who had been at his side and helped him on the trip, and Marco Cappato, who had collected, through the association Soccorso Civile SOS Eutanasia of which they are both members together with Gustavo Fraticelli, the missing funds to pay the Swiss clinic, showed up at the Carabinieri station in Massa to report themselves. Also in this case, as in that of Dj Fabo, a civil disobedience aimed at putting on trial article 580 of the penal code, entitled "incitement or aiding suicide", which essentially prohibits in Italy the aiding of voluntary death permitted in Switzerland. The phase of the investigations carried out by the Massa Prosecutor's Office concluded on September 28, 2017. The defendants were subsequently notified of the request for indictment by the Massa Prosecutor's Office to the investigating judge, who would have to decide whether to send Mina Welby and Marco Cappato to trial, accused of instigation or aiding and abetting suicide in the form of complicity. Last May 16, the two defendants, through their lawyers, communicated the waiver of the hearing before the preliminary hearing judge scheduled for May 31 and requested an immediate trial. "The decision to waive the preliminary hearing allows for an immediate trial to be requested, which determines a trial that will clarify the defendants' positions in relation to "a crime that came into force in the 30s, the fascist era," explained the Coscioni Association. After the trial for the death of DJ Fabo, Marco Cappato will once again be in front of an Assize Court, this time together with Mina Welby. They will be tried for a crime punishable in Italy by a serious sentence of 5 to 12 years in prison, just as the Milan Court of Assizes, through an ordinance, has referred the same law to the Constitutional Court for consideration.
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