Threatening 30 years in prison or thousands of euros in fines, but then only bringing 1 out of 1,000 crimes to justice is as useless as ensuring a certain but trivial punishment. Our politicians know this well and, considering that having an efficient justice system is much more complicated than threatening an exemplary (and sometimes exaggerated) punishment, they choose the latter path: they talk tough, but in the end, few will actually receive that sanction.
Often, however, they don’t even choose the easiest path, as in the case of the penalties applied to the road homicide in Casal Palocco, where a group of reckless individuals rented an extremely powerful car from unscrupulous renters and, in the midst of a delirious challenge, caused an accident in which a 5-year-old child lost his life and destroyed the lives of his parents and relatives. The penalty for such an avoidable tragedy inflicted on the driver is 4 years and 4 months; I don’t know how many will be spent in prison and what the penalty was for his accomplices (including the renter), but I fear it is even more meager, if not nonexistent.
It will be said that those young men had no criminal records; the fact remains that in Italy, someone who kills a child due to criminal recklessness receives a more lenient punishment than someone who organizes a Rave Party. There is often talk of “Bad Justice” when we should be talking about “Bad Legislation” because judges are forced to apply terrible laws to the few accused identified.
So, I ask myself, and I ask you: how effective, fair, and dissuasive is a “Legislative System” that sanctions so rarely, imposing such unjust penalties? Vincenzo di Loreto
Dear Mr. Di Loreto,
The case of Casal Palocco, a child killed due to a speed challenge with a car to be showcased on social networks, has left everyone speechless.
We have found ourselves angry and powerless, as if facing a Justice system that does not recognize the value of a human life. Someone has even compared the sentence (11 years of detention) proposed by Hungarian judges as part of a plea bargain to that of Ilaria Salis – (involved in a clash in the square, assuming the court establishes this, which caused injuries but not serious) – and the 4 years and 4 months imposed on the person responsible for the death of a child.
We are moving in a maze where there is no swiftness, certainties disappear, and the severity of the penalties is sometimes entrusted to laws that arise from political propaganda. It is very easy, you are right, to flaunt heavy tightening and the desire to “throw away the keys” of the cell knowing that this will not happen, it is not even fair to happen to that disproportionate extent.
The landscape is disheartening, but we all must insist on a request that measures the civilization of a country: fair penalties, proportionate to the seriousness of the crime and not to the current trend, reasonably long processes (we should say fast but maybe that’s hoping for too much), sentences executed with certainty. If everything is instead random, then many will think that committing a crime is not so serious after all.