The “jeweler of Italy,” Mario Roggero, moves like a bull in a china shop. Perhaps he is poorly advised. But at this rate, he will leave Bollate Prison only to serve his sentence under house arrest, as is customary for a person of his age. For a reason that is hardly understandable, the jeweler has allowed his case to become a political issue in order to force – by popular demand – the Head of State to grant a pardon. The latest move – his lawyers’ request to postpone the sentence pending the conclusion of the clemency procedure – was yet another mistake, as if that outcome were a foregone conclusion.
Essentially, both Roggero and his lawyers and supporters act as if they want to prevent Mattarella from granting the pardon if he does not want to lose face. As if their real interest were to cultivate a political case: a choice destined to fail for those who politically exploit it, but bringing a sea of misfortunes for Roggero and his family who, at the end of the day, will be the only ones to pay.
I am not a criminal lawyer and have not closely followed the trial reports, but I have formed some ideas.
It was not appropriate to adopt a defense strategy based on self-defense when the prerequisites were clearly lacking. An extension of the rule to cases like Roggero’s would have opened a legally unfounded and socially dangerous interpretation of self-defense itself. So much so that it is Roggero’s own defenders who propose amendments to the current text because they realized that the jeweler’s behavior could in no way comply with what the law provides. And frankly, in no civilized country, where the claim of a rule of law exists and some pages of Cesare Beccaria have been read, could such a rule be written: “Anyone who commits any crime to react to an injury suffered is not punishable.”
Gian Domenico Caiazza, a criminal lawyer whom we can trust for his correctness and seriousness (he was a protagonist in the battle for the separation of careers and the defender of Ottaviano Del Turco, an innocent victim of miscarried justice), clarified in an article in Il Foglio the unsustainability of the arguments supporting Roggero’s defense, the “gun-toting jeweler,” attributing it to “the disgraceful impulses of summary justice” boiling in the depths of public opinion and criticizing the fact that politics – for mere reasons of consensus – lends itself to supporting it.
Caiazza then points out that – according to the law – the sentence of 14 years and 9 months is not disproportionate but took into account mitigating circumstances. Furthermore, according to Caiazza, the idea of eliminating damage compensation as amended in the security decree is nonsense (destined to fall under the scrutiny of the Constitutional Court). It is right, instead, that the civil judge takes all circumstances into account when setting the amount of compensation (which does not seem to have been done in Roggero’s case).
A few days before the final sentence for Mario Roggero was issued (on July 15), a first-instance ruling by the Arezzo Court of Assizes caught my attention, which, on July 13, acquitted – recognizing her total incapacity to understand and will at the time of the facts – Giuseppina Martin, 67 years old, who confessed to having killed, strangling in her sleep with a scarf, her ninety-three-year-old mother Mirella Del Puglia, severely ill with Alzheimer’s. According to the preliminary reasons for the sentence, the daughter was recognized as having suffered stress from caregiving lasting 13 years without being able to count on support measures. It seems to me that this defense line would have been more appropriate and fruitful also for the jeweler (who was evidently disturbed by threats to his family members he had witnessed) rather than climbing onto a nonexistent self-defense claim after the immediacy of the danger had ceased.
As far as I am concerned, I find the Arezzo sentence abhorrent (the prosecutor had requested a 12-year prison sentence). But if Roggero intends to make comparisons, the reference to that case seems the most relevant, also because it is not a pardon but a decision on a crime, probably premeditated differently from those committed impulsively by the jeweler.
