29 Jun minor robbery’

With sentence no. 86 filed on 13 May 2024, the Constitutional Court has made a significant change to the crime of robbery, introducing a mitigation of the sentence in the presence of circumstances that reduce its severity. The Constitutional Court declared the constitutional illegitimacy of the art. 628, second paragraph, the Penal Code, in the part in which it provides only the penalty imposed by it for the so-called robbery. improper is decreased by an amount not exceeding one third when by nature, the species, the means, and methods or circumstances of the action, or for the particular tenuousness of the damage or danger, the fact appears to be minor. Consequentially, the Court declared the constitutional illegitimacy of the first paragraph of the art. 628, relating to the so-called robbery. own, in the part in which it does not provide for the same mitigating factor. The subject of the main proceedings is the accusation of improper robbery attributed to two subjects who allegedly took some foodstuffs of modest value from the shelves of a supermarket and managed to escape the intervention of the shop's staff by using some generic threatening phrases. and a push, to finally be tracked down near the business itself while they were consuming bread. The Court observed that in such cases the statutory minimum prison sentence for robbery, raised by the legislator to the extent of five years' imprisonment, can force the judge to impose a sanction that is actually disproportionate, so that the articles. 3 e 27, first and third paragraphs, of the Constitution require the introduction of a common effect decrease, up to a third, as a "safety valve" for minor events. This is the extension to robbery of what was decided by sentence no. 120 of the 2023 for extortion, crime also characterized by the high statutory minimum of five years of imprisonment and, while, from the possibility of consumption through minimum impact conduct, personal and patrimonial. The Court underlined that this extension follows both the principle of equality, in the sanctioning treatment of robbery and extortion, and to the principles of individualisation and re-educational purpose of punishment, i quali ostano all’irrogazione di sanzioni sproporzionate rispetto alla gravità concreta del fatto di reato.