European Court admits appeal against life sentence for boss Luigi De Micco

Surprising decision by the European Court of Human Rights: a life sentence issued by Italy called into question. The boss Luigi De Micco, sentenced to life imprisonment on 19 December 2018 by the GUP of the Court of Naples for having organised the murder of Salvatore Solla (sentence confirmed in all subsequent levels of judgment), has obtained an exceptional result.

Thanks to a complex appeal drafted by the lawyer Dario Vannetiello, the European Court has deemed the appeal admissible, opening the case “De Micco vs. Italy”. This is one of the rare cases in which an appeal by an Italian convicted person passes the strict admissibility test of the Court, a milestone not even achieved by former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. Even rarer is that the Court examines the legitimacy of a life sentence issued by Italian courts.

The main piece of evidence against De Micco was the wiretapping of telephone conversations between the alleged accomplices of the murder, obtained through numbers “dedicated” to the crime. Attorney Vannetiello argued that the wiretapped numbers had been identified in a completely illegitimate manner.

In fact, during a check on Lino Carbone and Antonio De Martino, neither investigated nor suspected at the time, the investigators managed to discreetly detect from their cell phones the telephone numbers used by De Micco and the others involved. Thanks to this information, the wiretaps were ordered that contributed to the conviction of De Micco and his accomplices.

According to Vannetiello, access to the phones was illegitimate for several reasons:

it was carried out on people who were not suspected at the time;
there was no authorization or control by the judicial authorities;
it was not recorded, so the investigators' activities are still uncertain;
the acquired data, such as phone numbers and contacts, were collected without seizing the devices;
Without a seizure, the interested parties could not challenge the access before a judge.
The arguments put forward by the defense, based on the experience of the lawyer Vannetiello in the field of legitimacy, were carefully considered by the European Court, which considered the objections raised to be well-founded, so much so as to schedule a rapid evaluation of the case.

The defense contested that the access to the phones' memory to locate numbers and contacts, validated by Italian judges, violated Articles 7, 8 and 13 of the European Convention on Human Rights, for a series of detailed reasons.

Such access is clearly not regulated by law and constitutes an unjustified invasion of the privacy of the interested parties, with serious consequences also for De Micco, recognized as the owner of one of the stolen contacts. This element was crucial in his conviction to “never-ending sentence”.

The next decision of the European Court could represent a historic moment, not only for Italian justice, but also for European justice.