A Rome appeals court granted house arrest on Monday to one of two American men jailed for killing an Italian police officer while the pair were teenagers on holiday in 2019, his lawyer told AFP.
Gabriel Natale-Hjorth will serve the remainder of his recently reduced 11-year sentence at his grandparents' home in Fregene outside Rome, after the appeals court agreed to the defence's request, his lawyer Fabio Alonzi said.
Natale-Hjorth, now 23, was found guilty in May 2021 along with his friend Finnegan Elder for the fatal stabbing of policeman Mario Cerciello Rega during a late-night encounter in Rome.
Both Elder, who was 19 at the time of the killing, and Natale-Hjorth, then 18, were sentenced to life in prison, a punishment their lawyers denounced as harsher than those given for premeditated mafia killings.
In 2022, the defendants saw their sentences reduced to 24 years for Elder, who wielded the knife during the attack, and 22 years for Natale-Hjorth, who helped his friend hide the weapon afterwards.
From the beginning, the case 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 in plain clothes jumped them from behind and did not identify themselves as police or 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.
Italy's highest court ordered a retrial in 2023.
Last month, the appeals court re-examining the case re-sentenced Elder to 15 years in prison and Natale-Hjorth to 11 years.
Under Italian law, the court has up to 90 days to publish its reasoning for the resentencing.
"Remember (Natale-Hjorth) has already served five years in prison," Alonzi told AFP.
On Monday, a lawyer for Cerciello's widow, Massimo Ferrandino, said his client Rosamaria was "filled with a profound sense of mistrust" over the court's decision.
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 also revealed multiple examples of police error, including the blindfolding of Natale-Hjorth while in custody.
The officer who blindfolded him was later handed a two-month suspended sentence.