The judges said: "Impagnatiello poisoned Giulia Tramontano to cause her to have an abortion, not to kill her."

As early as December 2022, he had begun researching online and administering rat poison to her, dissolving it in her drinks. According to the evidence gathered during the investigation and trial, he intended to abort her, eliminate the child she was carrying, which for him was merely a "problem," but not kill her. He then displayed his "rabid fury" and stabbed her to death that afternoon almost six months later, when he was exposed by the two women with whom he constantly lied and had parallel relationships. This is how, in short, the Milan Court of Assizes of Appeal explained, in the reasons filed well in advance, why it decided to uphold the life sentence for Alessandro Impagnatiello—the former bartender who stabbed his seven-months-pregnant girlfriend Giulia Tramontano to death with 37 wounds on May 27, 2023, leaving her body found four days later—but excluding the aggravating circumstance of premeditation in the murder.

The victim's family reacted harshly to the June 25 ruling. "Shame, shame. They call it law, but it reads like disgust," her sister Chiara wrote, adding: "He poisoned her for six months. He searched online to find out 'how much poison is needed to kill a woman.' Then he killed her. For the State, the supreme legislator, this is not premeditation."

For the Court (Judges Caputo and Anelli), however, "there is no evidence that would allow us to backdate the 32-year-old's intention to kill his 29-year-old girlfriend to the day he stabbed her in their home in Senago, near Milan. Having her ingest rat poison in the preceding months would have been intended to cause a miscarriage and provide "a drastic 'solution,'" the judges write, to the child she was expecting, whom he "identified as 'the problem' for his career, for his life." The purpose of the poisoning was "the abortion of the fetus" and not "the murder (...) of the mother."

In its 59-page reasoning, which includes highly technical legal passages, while confirming the other two aggravating circumstances of cruelty (eleven stab wounds while she was still alive, aware that her son Thiago was also dying) and the cohabitation bond, the Court clarifies that there was no "criminal deliberation cultivated over time and never abandoned until reaching the goal" which matured "only at 3 pm on May 27th," a few hours before the crime.

That afternoon, the barman realized he would be "unmasked" by Giulia and the other woman he was having an affair with, because the two had met on the same day and exchanged secrets. As soon as he learned that his partner was "showing up" at the Armani Hotel in Milan, where he was working, he left work at 5:00 PM and returned home on his scooter. And around 7:00 PM, when Giulia "set foot in the apartment where she was expected, she was attacked and killed" with 37 stab wounds. This is "too short a time frame to satisfy the chronological requirement" required to challenge premeditation, and the "'neutral' actions," such as returning home and waiting for his partner, "fail to establish any significant ambush" to warrant the aggravating circumstance.

The Court further states that Impagnatiello killed his girlfriend "not because she wanted to leave him, not because she was giving him a child that, deep down, he didn't want at all, and not even because he feared a future of legal action, legal disputes over child support obligations and joint custody", but "because she (...) had exposed him as a liar before those who, in his eyes, represented the 'public' projection of himself, the visible facade, inflicting on him what was for him an intolerable humiliation" on that "stage", which was the bar of that luxury hotel in the heart of Milan.

The Attorney General's Office could appeal to the Supreme Court of Cassation on the premeditation, which had been contested by the deputy Mannella and the prosecutor Menegazzo in the Carabinieri investigations, and the defense could insist on asking for the cancellation of the cruelty charge and the recognition of mitigating circumstances.