Italian court cuts sentences of two US men for officer's killing

An Italian appeals court on Wednesday reduced the decades-long sentences of two US men convicted of killing a police officer in Rome while on a teenage summer holiday in 2019.

Following a retrial ordered by Italy's highest court that began in March, the Rome appeals court resentenced Finnegan Elder and Gabriel Natale-Hjorth to 15 years and 11 years in prison, respectively.

Elder and Natale-Hjorth, friends aged 19 and 18 from San Francisco on vacation at the time of the killing, were sentenced to life in prison in May 2021 for stabbing policeman Mario Cerciello to death during a late-night encounter.

An appeals court the following year reduced the sentence to 24 years for Elder, who wielded the knife, and 22 years for Natale-Hjorth, who did not handle the weapon but helped hide it.

But Italy's highest court in March 2023 ordered a retrial to examine potentially mitigating factors, notably that the teenagers said they were unaware that Cerciello and his partner, who were in plain clothes at the time of the attack, were police.

Elder's lawyers, Renato Borzone and Roberto Capra, said in a statement Wednesday that the court's decision was "certainly more in line with Finnegan's actual responsibilities".

"It is regrettable that we have had to wait through five levels of jurisdiction to see recognised what the young American man has stated since his first interrogation," they said.

 Two versions 

 The case horrified Italy and led to an outpouring of public grief for the newlywed Cerciello, who was hailed as a national hero.

But the trial, which revealed multiple examples of police error, offered up two very different versions about what happened in the moments just before Elder stabbed Cerciello with an 11-inch (28-centimetre) camping knife on a dark Rome street.

While the prosecution's star witness, Cerciello's partner Andrea Varriale, testified that the officers were suddenly attacked, the teens said the two men jumped them from behind and did not identify themselves nor show their badges.

The Americans claimed self-defence, saying they thought the men were drug dealers, following their botched attempt to buy drugs earlier in the evening.

Defence lawyers had denounced the life sentences originally given to their clients -- Italy's stiffest sentence -- saying they were harsher than many given for premeditated killings by the mafia.

The high-profile case also threw a spotlight on police conduct in Italy after Natale-Hjorth was blindfolded while in custody.

The officer who blindfolded him was later handed a two-month suspended sentence.