What a state a state could never add to the emotional life imprisonment that already discounts a mother destined to spend the whole life to confront the sense of guilt and the pain of having made a tragic error costing lesions to the breastfeeding to her 18 month old baby? What does it mean to do justice in cases like this, in which life is in charge of a huge sentence alone?
It is to this question that the deputy prosecutor Paolo Storari seems to seek an answer, in the request for storage sent to the investigating judge of Milan, in which he is looking for a way to avoid the unfortunate mother a process and a penalty in a legal sensegiven that to those in a moral sense, educated and inflicted by the devastated conscience, there is no remedy.
He knows the prosecutor, – which in spite of how often it paints it is not, not yet at least, in the Italian legal system, audience accuser by definition – that the door of the law is close: for the fault without consciousness of those who make a mistake without realizing it (in this case an accident with the car during a maneuver in a private space has led to the accidental investment of the child) the law does not let the magistrate free his hands.
In these cases, in practice, we try to reduce the damage: the widely practiced solution is to propose to the mother “to negotiate a minimum penalty”, with “suspended punishment”, but the prosecutor underlines the substantial injustice of a right that ends up exploiting the person to affirm a principle: “In these cases “, writes the prosecutor,” applying a penalty by the state “is useless, indeed it appears even counterproductive, not having the criminal law any function to be performed, neither for the offender nor for the community”. No ability to prevent similar crimes with a cleansing effect, no need for re -education for that mother who certainly did not intend to commit a crime, but damaged her son not wanting him at all, on the contrary; without realizing what was happening.
The prosecutor proposes as an alternative to the judge to search if there are “relief valves that allow to exclude punishment (and also” the penalty of the process “) in the system)) So that the law is “practiced: not so much as a value in itself” as a “tool to get to the most just solution, with a view to humanity of punishment that brings the rules to people (and not vice versa). That valve, proposes, It could be the law that since 2014 allows you to archive for “tenuity of the fact”. But the road is impervious: In fact, the cases whose consequence are death or very serious injuries are excluded from the legislator. It would be possible to apply the law by interpreting as “slight” also the “facts that, while causing serious injuries, are characterized by minimal guilt”, and avoiding “a disproportion between crime and punishment, which would be essentially inflicted twice”.
The other only possibility, according to the prosecutor, would be to bring the case before the constituent courtto ask the Court if article 583 is legitimate, to the point where the serious personal injuries causes the serious personal injuries for the mother to the child to evaluate if there is no contrast with article 27 of the Constitution: “A possible sentence or the performance of a trial against the suspect would constitute a sort of treatment contrary to the sense of humanity”. That mom “already discounts a sort of” life sentence with an end never “ And a possible state penalty would have no function, whatever the theoretical to which we believe we inspire ».
“The principle of humanity of the penalty”, writes Storari, “recalls the state, that is, the owner of punitive power, to respect a superiority, ethics and deontological, compared to crime and its author: To avoid the degeneration that would like to replicate violence with violence, and thus establishing a fundamental difference that separates the penalty from blind revenge. (…) But the scope of the principle can go even beyond, making – for example – plausible and justifiable the choice not to impose the penalty in cases in which the subject, in the concrete affair, has already suffered “a sort of” natural punishment “,” that is, a serious afflicting consequence which, in fact, would make the further sanction not only disproportionate for excess but even “inhuman”.
It is not the first time that in the courts it has happened to confront situations like these in which The concrete case would ask to reduce the damage while the judge must clash with too rigid laws, which lend themselves to making equal parts between unequal, favoring injustices in substance.
Not by chance events such as those we are talking about have been discussed as school cases to criticize the excessive rigidity of the road murder law, Designed to hit serious conduct such as driving in a state of intoxication or under the effect of drugs, but written in order to lend themselves to raging even on cases such as those of this mother.
These are the cases regarding which there are risks connected to the future application to the law of artificial intelligence: casomai came up an AIs, would you know how to ask yourself the questions of this prosecutor and seek the solutions not only legally but also humanly passable?
It was also talked about about the opportunity to introduce Tests attacked for entry into the judiciary, provided for since 2026, wondering if they cannot favor a judicial conformism that is badly lent to the elasticity of facing dramas such as the one that arises here.
At the root of these cases there is in fact a theme that has been questioning philosophy and ethics for millennia: the relationship between law and justice and justice in its profound meaning, concepts that have distant roots and that are not unrelated to the evangelical dictation: Think of the concept of Saturday for the man opposed to man for Saturday.
Time will say which solution will find that judge and the system for the case of that unfortunate mother, but the mere fact that the theme of justice does not differ from the human helps to reconcile with a topic on which the public debate is too often poisoned.
