I grew up cultivating the principle that no one should touch Cain. Now I wonder if anyone wants to take care of Abel. Abele him, Gianni D’Accolti, 61, former handball national, public official. He does not want revenge on Cain, he asks for justice but the Italian judiciary may not be able to give it to him. Five years ago his son Davide, 23, an Engineering and Conservatory student, was killed while returning home in his small car, crashed by a car traveling in the wrong direction on state road 16, just outside Bari. Driving the murderous car a thirty year old who had taken alcohol and drugs. It is two in the morning of 21 February 2016. Davide was returning to Conversano, after having accompanied his friend Cristina home to Bari. Together they had rehearsed all evening, he at the piano, because the next day she was due to debut at the Petruzzelli theater (now an appreciated soprano).
Music in the blood
Davide wanted to be an engineer because he had music in his blood, he liked to repair ancient organs. With his father, mother and younger sister he had often said of the need for young people to be allowed to live on art. His desire partially satisfied: the family has formed an association that bears his name and supports young musicians. The latest initiative is the restoration of the eighteenth-century organ of his parish and the possibility of an organist accompanying the pre-holiday mass, paid for with the finances of the association.
The wrong penalty
Pap Gianni, after the death of Davide, leads a fierce campaign so that the institutions and the police forces do something to increase controls over the weekend: We must fight the sellers of drugs and death. Not for David who is no longer there, but for other young people like him. He buys pages of newspapers, he writes to Mattarella, he asks the Ministry of the Interior. In the general silence he asks, in vain, that his citizenship be revoked in order not to identify himself with the Italian State anymore. In October 2019, the thirty-year-old driving the killer car was sentenced, shortened, to three years and 8 months. The most rigorous law on street murder that came into force a few days after the crash and death of Davide D’Accolti cannot be applied to him. The young man is sentenced, but the judge is wrong to impose the sanction on him. Calculates the penalty, for manslaughter, considering the aggravating circumstances (drunkenness, drugs, speeding) and the mitigating circumstances (his regret and the desire that his family be compensated) to be equal.
The appeal to the Supreme Court
A mistake: the mitigating circumstances cannot be applied. Nobody notices the oversight: not the prosecutor, not the lawyers, only Father Gianni, even if he is fasting on criminal law. Reads, re-reads, studies the code. One morning he runs to the prosecutor’s office, the prosecutor is not there. There is another magistrate, sensitive, he listens to him, he understands. In an hour he writes the appeal to the Supreme Court (per saltum) because the application of the penalty is irregular: he deposits it 15 minutes before the deadline. The Supreme Court should read, decide and return the papers to Bari. After a year and a half he has not yet done so and his lawyers have already made it clear to Father Gianni: that process could now end in nothing, the limitation matures in the 2023.
A father’s request for justice
Gianni despairs: The real punishment, life imprisonment, was inflicted on me and my family. It seems that I am raging against my son’s killer. Not so, the disappointment towards the institutions. I just wish there was attention for Davide, maybe that whoever killed him can use his time to at least change his life. David no longer needs anything, if not a caress, even from justice. Gianni cries every time he talks about Davide. He cries, seeks faith and works for others with the association named after his son. He would like to find from God the answer he does not get from men.
March 24, 2021 (change March 24, 2021 | 23:00)
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