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Italy butchered mobsters’ rights by slamming door on parole
Filed 12h ago · Via Courthouse News · The Buffoon Desk
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Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0
Photo: stephen boisvert · CC BY 2.0 · via Wikimedia Commons
Europe's human rights court ruled Thursday that Italy unlawfully stripped four Mafia-linked lifers of any realistic path to parole by demanding cooperation with prosecutors as the price of eligibility, a rule invented in 2001 case law and applied retroactively to crimes from the 1980s and 90s.
The court found the aggravating 'Mafia method' factor used to justify the harsher regime wasn't even presented in three of the four cases and was expressly rejected in the fourth. Italy's Constitutional Court and the European court had already rejected the automatic link between silence and dangerousness back in 2019, prompting a 2022 overhaul that still requires 30 years served, four more than other lifers.
None of the four men will walk free because of this ruling. Italy will owe each 2,400 euros for nonfinancial harm, and the government did not respond to a request for comment.
The full dispatch is available from the source below.
✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK
You can build a law out of good intentions and grief, the kind that follows two murdered judges, and still end up with a rule that punishes people for crimes that were never actually proven against them the way the punishment assumed. Twenty years and a courtroom in Strasbourg later, the fix arrives as a few thousand euros and a promise that somebody, someday, might get a fair hearing. That's not justice moving fast, that's justice moving at the speed of an apology nobody asked for.
