Italian Supreme Court: Stealing food, if poor and hungry, is not a crime

Announcing the decision on Monday, the supreme court in Rome ruled that stealing small amounts of food out of desperation “does not constitute a crime”.

"The condition of the accused and the circumstances in which he obtained the merchandise show that he had taken the little amount of food he needed to overcome his immediate and essential requirement for nourishment," the court ruled in a written judgment.

“People should not be punished if, forced by need, they steal small quantities of food in order to meet the basic requirement of feeding themselves.”

One Italian newspaper, La Stampa, hailed the ruling as a victory for compassion at a time when economic crisis and rising unemployment have pushed many people into poverty.

“The court’s decision reminds us all that in a civilised country no one should be allowed to die of hunger,”the newspaper said in a front-page editorial.

Prior to this ruling, the 36-year old Ukrainian man was facing six months in jail for stealing a small package of hot dogs.

The unusual judgment was made in the case of a homeless man who was caught trying to steal two pieces of cheese and a pack of frankfurter sausages worth four euros (£3.15) from a supermarket in Genoa, in Italy’s northwest, in 2011. 

Roman Ostriakov, 36, originally from Ukraine, was spotted by a shopper who told supermarket staff.

Arrested and sent to court, he was initially sentenced to six months in prison and a 100 euro fine – which he was unable to pay.

His lawyers appealed, but the sentence was upheld. At the second and final stage of appeal – a right for any defendant under Italian law – the conviction was overturned and the sentence annulled.

So, what’s going to happen now? Are homeless people going to start flocking to Italy en masse to steal hot dogs from grocery stores and corner shops? Unlikely.

Certain, though, is that Italy won’t waste thousands of euros locking up poor people whose hunger, poverty, and social exclusion would not be solved by placing them in a metal cage — and certain, too, is that Italy’s Supreme Court has made a ruling that we Americans might find quite startling for its being framed by notions of social justice and compassion.

Indeed, one U.S. public defender said that he found the ruling to stand in striking contrast to the kind of punishment dished out to the homeless in the United States — by way of Bill Clinton’s notorious tough-on-crime “three-strikes” law.

Alec Karakatsanis — a former Washington, D.C., public defender and co-founder of Equal Justice Under Law, a nonprofit that fights inequality in the U.S. legal system — told Foreign Policy that Ostriakov’s appeal brought to mind the case of Michael Riggs, who stole vitamins from a California grocery store.

Riggs, who took the pills in what California’s Court of Appeals said was “a petty theft motivated by homelessness and hunger,” received a 25-year sentence under the state’s three-strikes law. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to take up the case. Only one justice voted to hear the appeal.

“It’s incredible to me that American courts think of the crime as the homeless person stealing, not as the fact that we live in a society where there are hundreds of thousands of homeless people,” Karakatsanis said.

The public defender added that the Italian ruling was incredible insofar as it challenged a number of structural assumptions about society and capitalism.

The Italian court’s decision was an uncommon one, he said, because it reflected a line of moral logic that held the potential to challenge structural assumptions.

“There’s something fundamentally threatening to the capitalist economic order in a ruling like this — the idea that a person is not personally responsible for an action they take out of economic necessity — because capitalism is based on creating that necessity for millions of people around the world,” he said.

Our “exceptional nation” certainly has a lot to learn.