Outrage as Italian nurse who strangled his doctor girlfriend, 27, to death during lockdown has his life sentence overturned because of the 'Covid stress' he was under during pandemic

A top Italian court has overturned the life sentence handed to a nurse who strangled his doctor girlfriend to death during lockdown because a lower court failed to account for 'Covid stress.'

Calabrian nurse Antonio De Pace was handed the life sentence after he strangled 27-year-old Lorena Quaranta to death in their home in Favara, in the Sicilian province of Agrigento, in March 2020. 

Quaranta, who was set to graduate with a degree in medicine that year, met her boyfriend and dated him for three years before moving in with him. The pair had been engaged. 

The doctor had been suffering from a sore throat for a week, which De Pace was convinced was a symptom of Covid. 

According to local media, he wanted to return to his home in Calabria but she wanted him to stay and bring her medicine, leading to a vicious fight that ended with her murder. 

After a suicide attempt, De Pace handed himself in to police, who began investigating and brought a case to Italian prosecutors. 

Despite his horrific actions, his lawyers claimed in Italy's Supreme Court of Cassation, the country's highest court of appeal, that De Pace suffered from a lapse of judgement caused by stress and fear of the virus. 

'It must be considered that the judges of merit have not fully verified whether, given the specificity of the context, it can be attributed, and to what extent, to the defendant for not having effectively attempted to counteract the state of anguish to which he was prey and, in parallel, whether the source of the discomfort, evidently represented by the arrival of the pandemic emergency with all that it has determined in the life of each person and, therefore, also of the protagonists of the story, and, even more, the contingent difficulty of remedying it, constitute factors affecting the measure of criminal liability', the all-male panel wrote. 

This is despite a psychiatric consultant finding no signs of psychosis, though they found that De Pace had a personality prone to violence, local media reported. 

Major Italian figures have been in uproar since the court's decision to overturn the sentence. 

The Democratic Party deputy Michela Di Biase wrote on Facebook that she was 'left speechless', adding: 

'The pandemic has been widely ignored for its effects on the mental health of girls and boys but is seen as a mitigator for femicide. 

'The news of the decision of the judges of Cassation that annuled the life sentence of Lorena Quaranta's murderer is terrible.