Naples, thirteen years later, the four Falcons police officers acquitted

Naples – It all began in July 2013. At the heart of the proceedings is an operation carried out in Naples by a patrol from the Falchi section of the State Police. According to the trial's reconstruction, the check, which began in the Piazza Carità area, then continued through the city center streets to Calata San Marco.

What the officers considered a police check later turned into a legal proceeding, in which particularly sensitive charges were brought: assault, kidnapping, and false information. Two people arrested during the operation filed their claims as injured parties, giving rise to a lengthy legal dispute, including over compensation.

The accusations and the request for compensation

One of the cruxes of the case was the reconstruction of what happened during the arrest. According to the prosecution's argument, the injured parties were told that they suffered injuries that would heal in about ten days and that they had been physically assaulted, which, according to the defense, was also attributed to a slap.
On the civil level, a particularly substantial compensation request had been made, indicated in the documents as approximately 700 thousand euros.

The issue of compensation ran parallel to the criminal proceedings. An initial decision recognized the right to compensation, with a subsequent ruling impacting the further procedural developments of the case.

The passage to the Supreme Court

Over the years, the case passed through various judicial offices and various procedural stages. The Court of Cassation intervened, overturning the previous decision and ordering the case to be returned to Naples for reconsideration.

It is precisely from that passage that the final phase of the proceedings began, culminating now in the decision of the Second Criminal Section of the Court of Appeal of Naples, presided over by Judge Cappello.
The judges, after having re-examined the trial material, acquitted all four defendants.

Di Maio, Russo, Marino, and Lepre acquitted

The sentence concerns Paolo Di Maio, Salvatore Russo, and Dario Marino, assisted by the lawyer Paolo Abenante, and Inspector Ernesto Lepre, defended by the lawyers Alfredo Sorge and Mauro Valentino.

All were acquitted of the charges that had undermined the proceedings for years.
The Court of Appeal's decision therefore represents the final outcome of a legal case that began thirteen years ago and developed through different assessments of the evidence acquired during the proceedings.

A legal affair that lasted thirteen years

The time elapsed between the events and the sentencing reflects the extent of a particularly lengthy trial. Thirteen years have passed since the July 2013 review, during which the charges were examined at various levels of the courts, until the Court of Appeal's new ruling.

The defense insisted on the need for a comprehensive rereading of the evidence gathered during the proceedings, arguing that a different assessment of the documents would have allowed for a different reconstruction of the incident.
And it is precisely on the reassessment of the procedural framework that the final phase of the trial focused.

The final word after a long legal process

The ruling by the Second Criminal Section of the Court of Appeal of Naples brings to a close, at least on the merits, a case involving four members of the State Police that had been wracked by courtrooms for over a decade.

A proceeding that began with a street check, transformed into a criminal charge and accompanied by a compensation dispute, thus ends in an acquittal for all defendants.

The ruling now restores a different reconstruction of the case to the procedural documents than that supported by the previous disputes, at the end of a judicial process also marked by the intervention of the Court of Cassation and the subsequent referral back to Naples.