The Italian Court of Appeal amazed the whole country with its sensational decision: the judges fully acquitted the 60-year-old resident of the city of Catanzaro in the south of the country. Pietro Lamberti was accused of molesting an eleven-year-old girl. The court ruled that a real feeling flared up between the accused and the girl.
The country's highest cassation court overturned the sentence of the local court, which issued a decision on the detention of a pensioner.
The relationship between a girl from an unfavorable family and a man began two years ago, when a 60-year-old social worker was assigned to an 11-year-old baby as a guardian. And in the same summer, a couple were found in bed in a Lamberti country house.
According to Italian law, the minimum age for consent to sexual intercourse is 14 years, and if one of the partners is a state-appointed guardian, then 16 years.
A pensioner was sentenced by a local court to five years in prison, but the Supreme Court of Cassation quite unexpectedly acquitted Lamberti, deciding that there really were tender feelings between an elderly man and a girl.
The court explains its decision by the fact that during the hearings of this case, numerous recordings of telephone conversations between the guardian and the girl were heard, which clearly testify to the true love between the couple.
It was found that the social worker strongly discouraged his ward from entering into an intimate relationship with him because of the fear that the girl could become pregnant. However, the man still could not resist the temptation.
Investigators also claim that according to the testimony of witnesses, they say that the girl in every possible way provoked her lover by dressing in too open dresses, while “forgetting” about underwear.
However, the defendant was still tormented by remorse. In conversations with the girl, he admitted that he could not look into the eyes of her mother, who had entrusted him with a child. He convinced the baby that they should keep this secret forever and take it with them to the grave.
At the trial, Lamberti was very embarrassed, now and then blushing under the eyes of the judges. He claimed that he hid his intimate relationship with the ward because he was afraid that they would be separated forever.
The decision of the Supreme Court of Cassation was met with a flood of criticism from the inhabitants of Italy and the Catholic Church. Meanwhile, the case was again referred to the local Calabrian court. It is not yet known what the final verdict of the court will be.
Last month, two housewives from Salerno hit the front pages of Italian newspapers. Bored at home girls 27 and 29 years old found a very unusual way of entertainment, which brought them into custody. Ladies searched boys under 14 on social networks, lured them into their home and committed various forms of abuse over them.
The whole story surfaced after one of the families of the raped child noticed significant changes in the behavior of her child. Soon the police took up the matter, which conducted an investigation and, after interviewing many witnesses and checking the correspondence on Facebook, went on the trail of desperate housewives.
