A soft-touch judge has acquitted a brute whose seven-minute beating of his estranged wife ended with a brutal punch that nearly killed her.
Lucia Regna’s shattered face had to be reconstructed with 21 titanium plates following the attack.
Her optic nerve was permanently damaged, leaving her with irreversible vision loss in one eye.
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Yet the judge has sparked outrage after dismissing the charge of abuse against her estranged husband, whose name has not been reported.
Convicted of the lesser charge of personal injury with mitigating circumstances, he was handed a suspended sentence of just 18 months.
The prosecution had sought four and a half years, as reported by Need To Know.
According to Judge Paolo Gallo, Lucia’s ordeal in July 2022 was not “the result of an unmotivated and inexplicable outburst of anger, but an outpouring framed within the logic of human relationships”.
The man’s “bitterness”, he reasoned, was “humanly understandable” because she had another partner and had “communicated the separation in a brutal manner”.
Lucia, 44, described “living through hell”, enduring verbal, economic, and psychological abuse throughout her 20-year marriage.
Despite being called “btch”, “sut”, “s*it”, and “worthless”, and even allegedly threatened with death, the judge ruled these were “phrases to be understood in their specific context”.
Lucia, who has two children with the perpetrator, is reported to be “in shock” after the verdict.
She used to reconstruct nails, but can no longer work because she cannot see up close.
Her lawyer, Annalisa Baratto, said: “The ruling dissects and humiliates the victim, while being lenient toward the man who smashed Lucia’s face and caused her to lose sight in one eye.”
