Council of Europe questions Italy’s prisoner-abuse probes
(ANSA) – Strasbourg, November 19 – The Council of Europe in Strasbourg on Tuesday published a report criticizing persistent overcrowding in Italian prisons and raised a series of questions regarding how Italian authorities investigate suspected cases of prisoner mistreatment.
The Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT), which authored the report, based its conclusions regarding mistreatment investigations on detailed analysis of the cases of Stefano Cucchi and Mario Gugiotta, ANSA confirmed. Cucchi died while in police custody in Rome’s Pertini prison hospital on October 22, 2009, one week after being arrested on a drug charge.
Mario Gugiotta was beaten by police outside of the Olympic Stadium in Rome in May 2010.
The CPT pointed out that when Cucchi and Gugiotta were each brought into court after their arrests, they bore visible lesions, yet magistrates failed to have their injuries noted in hearing transcripts or to order an immediate medical visit to collect possible evidence of mistreatment.
Without mentioning the Cucchi case by name, the committee criticized investigators who threw out the hypothesis that Cucchi had been abused prior to being brought before a judge.
The CPT also marveled at how Italian prisoner-mistreatment investigations resulted in so few convictions. In the Cucchi case, a hospital director, two physicians and a hospital staff member were convicted in June 2013 for not properly treating Cucchi’s health condition. An autopsy shortly after Cucchi’s death found he had two broken vertebrae and internal organ damage, but the court found he was killed by ”severe shortage of food and liquids”.
The guilty are on parole rather than serving prison time, and three police guards and three nurses who were also on trial were acquitted.
A 2001 police raid on the Armando Diaz school in Genoa, which was being used as temporary headquarters for an activist organization protesting a G8 summit, resulted in 93 arrests and 61 hospitalizations for police-inflicted injuries, including three left in critical condition and one in a coma. Prosecutors put 125 policemen on trial, including supervisors and an assistant chief of police, but none of the accused served time despite convictions.