They insult Mattarella online, sentenced to public utility works – Corriere.it

Nine months of sentence to public utility work, for offense to the honor or prestige of the President of the Republic in a post published on the Facebook group called Sergio Mattarella is not my president, it may seem like a lot. But, on balance, they are nothing compared to the heaps of years in prison they risked in court – for the other two offenses of offense against the freedom of the President of the Republic (from five to 15 years) and instigation to commit a crime ( from one to five years) – the two internet users who wrote those online messages: messages that the President of the Republic disapproved, in offensive terms, of the institutional choices made during the political consultations of May 2018, and in particular the vanished appointment as Minister of Economics of Professor Paolo Savona (later going to lead Consob) in the first Conte grillo-League government.

From the two heaviest accusations the Milanese judge Alessandra Di Fazio in fact acquitted the two defendants, as also requested by the Milan prosecutor who had received the documents from Palermo in these terms after the investigating judge Giuliano Castiglia in June 2021, noting the territorial incompetence of the Sicilian capital with respect to the charges formulated by the Palermo prosecutors on the internet, he had consequently broken up the proceedings and sent the documents to the residences of the various suspects. The two ended up in Milan, and now acquitted of the two most serious crimes, but were sentenced by the judge in abbreviated procedure (therefore with the automatic discount of a third) to nine months for insulting the honor or prestige of the President of the Republic, crime committed by the two defendants with two posts that insulted Mattarella and at times called for threatening reactions to his choices. However, the two convicts were able to take advantage of one of the provisions introduced by the so-called Cartabia reform, and that is, they were able to see their imprisonment converted into a substitute sentence identified in a program of public utility works.

Also in this procedure the identification of the authors of online messages was carried out without the aid of social network platforms, and operated (where possible) only thanks to different elements of investigation. Once again, in fact, the platforms (as in this case Facebook) replied that many of the posts listed in the request for assistance sent by the Italian magistrates, although offensive and controversial, to the social network seem to constitute a language protected by the first amendment of the Constitution of the United States, according to which precisely the freedom of speech and even defamatory, abusive or offensive language is not generally prosecutable in the United States. Only in one case (a post in which the Internet user also pronounced a threat) did the Americans seem plausible, asking for further proof that such a threat could be taken seriously in Italy, rather than understood only as political hyperbole.