Overview
- The Buenos Aires criminal court released its full reasoning and kept a three-year sentence in suspense for Felipe Pettinato over the 2022 Belgrano apartment fire that killed neurologist Melchor Rodrigo.
- Judges Enrique Gamboa, Gustavo Valle and Gabriel Vega said the fire was caused by imprudence in a setting of drug use, not by intent to harm.
- The panel explained that a two-year term added to a prior nine-month suspended sanction would exceed the three-year ceiling allowed, so they set a total of three years in suspense.
- As conditions, Pettinato must keep a fixed address, accept supervision by the penal execution authority, continue drug treatment, and provide a genetic profile for the national database once the judgment is final.
- The court noted his April 2024 nine-year conviction for sexual abuse, weighed requests that ranged from 4 years 7 months to 15 years, and recorded that he chose not to testify during the trial.