The government has decided to insert a new article to extend the penalty of those who kill a woman with life imprisonment. But the rules (very severe) actually already exist
Although he has always been progressive and left, Giovanni Fiandaca has raised himself. The Insigne jurist read the text of the government bill that would like to introduce the new crime of “femicide” into the code, punishing it with life imprisonment, and wrote: “We would have to put our hands in the hair, it is an insult to the principles of a constitutionally oriented criminal law”. Then he even invited his colleagues university teachers to strike “against yet another political exploitation of criminal law”.
And to think that the government presented the proposal precisely with the 8 Marchwomen’s progressive festival, and has chosen a title that has the typical connotations of hyper-feminist and “Woke” culture: the right, in fact, is not used to appreciating the term “femicide” and indeed disputes it (with many reasons) because it has a strongly ideological content and because it attributes to any killing of woman-but also to mistreatment-an inevitable motivation of gender and a cultural origin. And that’s not always.
The fact remains that the government, on the proposal of the three ministers Carlo Nordio, Matteo planted and Eugenia Roccella, proposed a new article of the penal code which, if approved, will punish with life sentence “Anyone who causes the death of a woman when the fact is committed as an act of discrimination, or hatred towards the offended person as a woman, or to repress the exercise of his rights or freedoms, or in any case the expression of his personality”. The text is very clear, no doubt about it. But the possible objections are also. The first is that no pain, even the hardest, disincentive the crimes, so much so that in America the electric chair is not able to curb the number of murders. Many jurists then argue that for the judges it will not be easy at all to identify the cultural and ideological and gender motivations behind the killing of a woman. The most effective criticism of the new crime, however, lies in the fact that it is useless to insert it in the criminal code because, mostly, it is already considered covered. Today article 577 provides that the murder is punished with life imprisonment if it is committed “against the spouse also legally separated, against the other part of the civil union or against the person permanently cohabiting with the culprit, or it linked by emotional relationship”. So the killing of a wife, a cohabiting partner and a girlfriend is already punished with life imprisonment. Penalty that article 576, in the fifth paragraph, establishes whether the killing is committed by those who, male or female, persecuted his victim.
Marco Pelissero, professor of criminal law in Turin, then recognizes that it is true that at the moment the code does not punish with life imprisonment who kills an ex -spouse (male or female), an ex -boyfriend and a former partner, but recalls that in these three cases the penalty is very high because it goes from 24 to 30 years of imprisonment, and that a consolidated jurisprudence imposes the judge stringent in recognition. Pelissero concludes: “But if the penalties are already very high today, what sense does it make to propose the new case?”.
And it is true that our system, for the murder as for other crimes, provides that the judges can apply aggravating circumstances to individual cases (for example the “futile reasons”) and attenuating (for example the fact that the accused is uncensored), which end up increasing or reducing the sentence. But the system of aggravating and attenuating responds to a fundamental principle of judicial civilization, which tomorrow will inevitably be applied also to the crime of “femicide”, if it will be introduced into the code. So it is not certain that the sentence of life imprisonment would be automatic and guaranteed.
Of course, nobody can deny the existence and seriousness of the phenomenon. There are many women killed, although in the last decade the data of the Ministry of the Interior describe a tendential drop in “feminicides”, from 179 of 2013 to 113 of 2024. But it is not said that the new article of the code will change things. In reality, it is not even said that he manages to pass a scree of constitutionality: the union of the criminal chambers, which groups the criminal lawyers, in fact believes that the “feminicide” could easily end up in the examination of the Consulta for violation of the principle of equality (article 3 of the Constitution establishes that “all citizens are equal before the law, without distinction of sex, breed, of religion … Treatment compared to other murder victims, also motivated by discrimination or hatred “.
Gian Domenico Caiazza, who was the president of the criminal lawyers, is certain that the new crime would not go through the Constitutional Court: “It is like arguing that a murder for female reasons is more serious than the murder of the gay son by the father who is ashamed of it, or the murder of a transsexual …”.
