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28 April 2021 The Court of Appeal of Florence, at the end of the second trial after the postponement ordered by the Supreme Court, sentenced the 28-year-old Alessandro Albertoni and the 29-year-old Luca Vanneschi, both from Castiglion Fibocchi (Arezzo), to 3 years of imprisonment each for attempted group sexual violence, a crime as a result of which Martina Rossi, the 20-year-old Genoese student who crashed on the night of 3 August 2011 from the sixth floor of a hotel in Palma de Mallorca, where she was on vacation with her friends, would die.
The sentence was issued this afternoon, at 4 pm, and was read by President Alessandro Nencini. Present in the courtroom were the two young convicts (who did not release spontaneous statements before the council chamber as had instead been announced) and Martina's parents, Bruno Rossi and Franca Murialdo, who fought for a long time to get the case reopened.
The Court upheld the sentence illustrated by the Deputy Attorney General Luigi Bocciolini on 7 April: at the end of his indictment he had asked for the two young men to be sentenced to 3 years of imprisonment, which will expire by prescription between the end of next summer and the autumn. The defenses of the two defendants in the hearing of last April 14 had asked for the acquittal for their clients.
The lawyer Stefano Buricchi in his harangue in defense of Vanneschi had asked for absolution assuming that the young Genoese would have committed suicide by throwing herself from the terrace of the abergo. A similar request for acquittal had come from the lawyer Tiberio Baroni, Albertoni's lawyer, supporting the thesis according to which Martina Rossi would not have slipped while trying to move from one terrace to another of the hotel in a vain attempt to avoid rape.
Albertoni's defender had hypothesized that the fall would have occurred from the center of the terrace and therefore one could think of an accidental flight, because she would have leaned too far from the balustrade while vomiting after having smoked a joint. Albertoni and Vanneschi are accused of having attempted the rape of the twenty-year-old from Genoa who at dawn on 3 August 2011, returning from an evening at the disco, lost her life falling from the sixth floor of the 'Santa Ana' hotel in Palma de Mallorca. where he was on vacation with friends.
According to the reconstruction of the prosecution, in Palma de Mallorca on the night between 2 and 3 August Martina Rossi went up to the room of the two young people because in her room her friends were in the company of the other two boys of the group of Arezzo and had formed two couples . At dawn Martina fell from the balcony of room 609 of the 'Santa Ana' hotel, that of the two young Albertoni and Vanneschi, to escape, according to the accusation, an attempted rape. After investigations in Spain where the case was filed as a suicide, Martina's parents, Bruno Rossi and Franca Murialdo, managed to get the case reopened.
In the first instance in Arezzo on 14 December 2018, the two defendants were sentenced to 6 years of imprisonment for attempted rape and death as a result of another crime (later extinguished due to a statute of limitations). On 9 June 2020 the Court of Appeal of Florence had acquitted Albertoni and Vanneschi "because the fact does not exist".
The Supreme Court of Cassation on 21 January overturned the acquittal sentence by arranging a new trial for the two defendants as requested, during the indictment, by the deputy attorney general Domenico Seccia and accepting the appeals presented by the public prosecutor of Florence and by the civil party. Now the conviction decision for the accused by the Florence Court of Appeal in the bis process.