Milan prosecutors on Wednesday
requested that right-to-die activist Marco Cappato be acquitted
over him helping a blind, tetraplegic Italian ex-DJ commit
assisted suicide in Switzerland last year.
They field a petition requesting a ruling on the
constitutionality of Italy's law banning assisted suicide,
judicial sources said.
Cappato is on trial for helping Fabiano Antoniani, aka Dj
Fabo, end his life at the Dignitas clinic.
Prosecutors said Wednesday that no crime had been committed,
judicial sources said.
Cappato told the trial last month that people undergoing
"terrible suffering with irreversible illnesses" have the right
to "choose how to die; that is a fundamental human right".
Prosecutor Sara Arduini told the court that "Marco Cappato
had no role in the executive phase of the assisted suicide of
Fabiano Antoniani, and he did not even reinforce his intention
to die".
After reiterating several times that Dj Fabo's desire to kill
himself was "as strong as granite" since he had lost all hope of
even the slightest improvement in his life, Arduini said Cappato
had "indeed delayed Dj Fabo's plan by trying to involve him in
his political struggle to try to give him a new perspective on
life," judicial sources said.
Arduini and her colleague Tiziana Siciliano went on to argue
that the court of assizes should ask for a ruling on the
constitutionality of Article 580 of Italy's criminal code,
banning assisted suicide.
In her summing up, Siciliano cited English humanist and
philosopher Thomas More's Ideal City, saying "five hundred years
ago it was said that if human suffering is intolerable there is
a right to interrupt it applying the prudent control of the
priest and magistrate, the religious authority and the State",
judicial sources said.
She added: "Thomas More was executed because of his ideas but
then he was made a saint.
"I don't want this for Cappato, to be first executed and then
beatified".
Siciliano voiced the hope that there would not be "a guilty
verdict followed by a revision of the trial".
Cappato said "if the assistance I gave to Fabiano were to be
adjudged irrelevant, then I prefer to be found guilty rather
than acquitted".
He asked the court to think about all the people who have
left Italy "in secret" for Switzerland to commit assisted
suicide in the last few years.
"The difference here is that Fabiano decided to do it
publicly", Cappato said.
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