Violence in prison, the carabiniere at the trial: "Misdirection on the videos"

He told the judges about the difficulties he encountered in seizing the internal video surveillance footage that showed the violence against inmates, videos that were later crucial in attributing responsibility to individual officers.

He was the former commander of the Carabinieri company of Santa Maria Capua Vetere, Emanuel Macri, currently in command of the Cagliari company, the first witness today at the trial (underway before the Court of Assizes of the court of Santa Maria Capua Vetere) for the violence against inmates that occurred on 6 April 2020 in the Caserta prison of Santa Maria Capua Vetere.

In the process I am 105 defendants between penitentiary police officers, officials of the Department of Penitentiary Administration (Dap) and doctors of theLocal health authority of Caserta on duty in the county jail at the time of the incident.

A "difficulty", the one encountered by the commander, which pushed the investigators to contest the hypothesis of the crime of obstruction of justice to the then head of the Dap in Campania, Antonio Fullone, and to the prison officials who intervened in the Caserta prison to "erase" the evidence of the beatings, crystallized in the images from the internal cameras.

"April 10, 2020 - Macrì reports - After receiving the mandate from the Prosecutor's Office to investigate what happened on April 6, I sent my collaborators to the prison to obtain the CCTV footage, and they were told that the internal video surveillance system, particularly in the Nile ward where the violence had taken place, was not working." 

According to Commander Macrì, the following day, April 11, the Carabinieri returned to the penitentiary, where they acquired the notes sent by the prison to the company that maintained the cameras, which highlighted the malfunctioning of the systems.

"We immediately contacted," explains the former commander of the Carabinieri of Santa Maria Capua Vetere, "an engineer from the company that handled the video surveillance cameras on behalf of the ministry, who told us that the initial remote checks revealed no anomalies in the prison's video surveillance system."

Commander Macrì explains how the diversion occurred

The carabinieri returned to the prison and found that on the first floor of the Nilo section the cameras were working, on the second floor a cable had been disconnected, but once it was reconnected the systems had started working again, while on the third and fourth floors everything was normal.

"On April 14th, given the difficulty in receiving internal footage, we decided to seize the entire prison video surveillance system," Macrì later told the court. The Carabiniere then emphasized that "we had no knowledge of what happened on April 6th until at least April 9th, when the families of the beaten inmates staged a demonstration outside the Santa Maria Capua prison to protest the violence to which the inmates had been subjected."

The investigation into the beatings began with notes from Samuele Ciambriello, the regional ombudsman for prisoners, the Santa Maria Capua Vetere police station, and the supervisory magistrate Marco Puglia, who was the first to visit the prison after the events of April 6. Ciambriello had received audio files from the families of the beaten inmates, sent by the inmates to their own relatives, relating to the abuse they had suffered: messages such as "they beat us to death," which Macrì also recalled today. The court will return to court on March 15.