Wrongfully Imprisoned for 21 Years: How a Misinterpreted Word Destroyed a Family

Take a boy  in his 30s, who lives in a small town in southern Italy. He is young and he enters into the drug trade to easily grab some money to spend with girls and friends. He consumes and sells drugs, a never easy to leave way of life. But somehow he manages to improve his existence, thanks to the help of a beautiful girl with whom he decides to set up a family.

It still takes a while to get rid of the uncomfortable past, but A. M. puts it all together and finds a job. When the hard part looked over, it came the terrible setback: a 21-year conviction for manslaughter, never committed.

A past as a drug addict but not a murderer

21 years of his life spent behind bars.

A terrible experience. A. M. is unable to see his sons for seven consecutive years, not granted to meet them even to go to their baptism or communion.

He is forced to live in a cell with dangerous subjects of all kinds, sharing cramped spaces with inmates suffering from contagious diseases,washing with cold water during winter…

It all began when agents investigating upon a drug dealing in which A.M. was involved, intercepted and misinterpreted a dialect word.

It was 8.30 a.m. in the morning when A. M. calls his wife and tells her that he will be late due to a weight that is slowing his pace.

He is referring to a small tractor he was carrying attached to his car, but in the Puglian dialect, the term for "dead" is very similar to that for "weight".

And the cargo carried immediately becomes a corpse for the investigators. On May 15, 1996, A. M. was arrested. During the years of conviction he served his sentence in seven different prisons never obtaining a prize permit, because the anger he was is suffering for the unlawful detention led him to be polemical and  contested with prisonstaff.

His wife has always remained by his side

On her 43rd birthday, A. M.'s wife realizes that she spent twenty-one years of her life waiting for his love to come back free. She was a young girl and very much in love with this man a little older than her.

Meanwhile, they got married and she got pregnant. When A. M. entered prison, their two children were two years old and a few days old, and she had to raise them alone.

Loneliness and fear, are the keywords that most often recurred in this lady’s life. Just met and already separated, a married life practically never spent together. Moreover, she had to constantly change houses to follow his pilgrimage from Puglia to Calabria. The looks of people who did not believe in the innocence of his great love, family members worried because they saw their daughter anchored to an increasingly difficult innocence to be proved.

It was not easy for her to endure certain hardships: she has not found an actual job but she has to support her children, cover the legal fees. When she comes to pick up her husband out of jail, she arrives with a grungy old car.

And the children are practically two strangers to the man who generated them. This misadventure will mark them forever, having deprived them of the father figure.

A suffering that did not spare even his elderly parents: the constant changes of prison from one region to another did not favor their poor economic conditions and therefore they didn’t seen their son for nine years. They could only make a call, once a week, for ten minutes.

In prison he studies law and practices yoga

A. M. decides that his years in prison should not be considered lost and find the strength to make the most of the much free time he has. Although he has a huge weight on his shoulders, knowing that he is being wrongly imprisoned, he manages to find the right concentration to study.

He graduates in technical high school and after graduation he enrolled in law school. Now that he has come out under surveillance, continues his studies at home.

A. M. understood that he had hit rock bottom, the wrong detention was still born from the fact that he was known to law enforcement. So that's enough, he started studying deeply and dedicated himself to yoga, a discipline of rigor that changed the way he sees life. While absorbed in study and meditation, he joined the sport, to release the tension.

He writes his own review application, the lawyer makes the investigations

A. M. had  always told his lawyers in Rome: I am innocent. But it's one thing to say, it's one thing to prove it. And A. M. knows that body of evidence for his innocence, after an irrefutable sentence that convicted him of murder, relies in the retrial, a judicial tool rarely used due to its conditions very difficult to meet.

Upon his law studies, A. M. writes his own review application and sends it to many lawyers attaching his judicial story, hoping to find someone eager to fight by his side. After many attempts he finds a lawyer convinced of his innocence. The lawyer looks for documents, hears witnesses and investigates, doing what it should have done 20 years earlier.

A difficult goal to achieve: over turning a 24 years conviction confirmed on appeal and Supreme Court but based upon lack of evidence, of murder weapon, of motive. Only the tenacity  of the lawyer led to a successful review of the trial. After twenty-one years of unlawful detention A. M. could finally re-embrace his wife and children as a free man.

An insurmountable wall: three degrees of judgment

His time in prison was extremely difficult, lightened only by the passions that kept him focused. In all this difficulty, the hardest part was convincing himself that he could manage to change his fate, overturning a singularly short judicial process for the Italian average.

A. M. was convicted of kidnapping, concealment of a corpse and murder with the aggravation of premeditation  by going before three Courts in just three years.

After the review was accepted, it sought compensation

The first thing A. M. did when he got out of prison? Swimming in the sea.

Who knows whether the judges would have guessed, the same that reviewed the case declaring the first conviction sentence "illogical."

The contradictory elements, which exonerated A. M. of murder, were found by the Judges in another conviction handed down against him, that of drug dealing.

Now, thanks to this pronouncement of unlawful detention, A. M. is carrying out the judgment for compensation damages, to get paid him back for the years he lost.

Paradox: he had already been unlawfully arrested on murder

A singular story, which becomes even more grotesque if you think it contains its own precedent.

A. M. had already been the victim of a miscarriage of justice and had already been wrongly found guilty of murder. About ten years before the beginning of this story, he was sentenced to twenty-one years and served a year in prison; he was later found to be definitively innocent and his damages compensated by the State.