Brunetta says Dell'Utri should go free

(ANSA) - Rome, April 14 - A heavyweight in the Italian centre-right Forza Italia (FI) party on Tuesday called for releasing a convicted mafia criminal and former senior advisor to ex-premier Silvio Berlusconi from prison. FI deputy whip Renato Brunetta declared that ex-senator Marcello Dell'Utri had received a sentence based on a crime that was applied retroactively, just as the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) found that a former Palermo police chief was condemned for collusion with the mafia before the crime had been sufficiently established.
    Dell'Utri has been convicted of tax fraud, false accounting and collusion with the Sicilian Mafia. The last charge was upheld in May 2014 by the Italy's highest criminal court, the Cassation Court, which sentenced him to seven years.
    "Marcello Dell'Utri should be released from prison. After the bitter solidarity that it is necessary to express to a State servent like Bruno Contrada, thoughts immediately go to those who were jailed for an analogous retroactive application of the law," said Brunetta. Bruno Contrada is a former police chief of Palermo and former deputy director of the Italian civil intelligence service SISDE. On Tuesday the ECtHR announced a ruling that Contrada had been wrongfully convicted of collusion with the mafia, because during the era of his alleged crimes (1979-1988), the newly introduced crime was not yet "sufficiently clear". The Strasbourg court ruled that the Italian State should pay Contrada 10,000 euros in moral damages. Brunetta said collusion with the mafia did not become "consolidated" until 1994 and Dell'Utri was convicted for actions that allegedly took place in 1992.