The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) rejected on Thursday four Italian citizens’ request to reduce their life imprisonment sentence to 30 years of prison and ruled that their bid was out of time.
The case before the ECHR started when four Italian citizens filed a request to their national courts to review the enforcement orders of their sentences. They were sentenced to life imprisonment with daily isolation for crimes committed between 1980 and 1990. After their conviction, the four prisoners asked authorities to reduce their sentences to 30 years of prison as stated by a reform introduced in 1999. The reform in question was the law number 479 of 1999, according to which a person sentenced to life can be tried under a summary procedure. A person sentenced to life and tried under this simplified procedure has the right to obtain the replacement of his sentence to 30 years of prison. Nevertheless, Italian courts rejected the applicants’ request and ruled their applications inadmissible.
Following the 1999 reform, two other legislative reforms were introduced in Italy. The first came into force in 2000 and allowed prisoners sentenced to life to ask to be tried under the summary procedure at their next hearing. The second was Decree-law number 341 of 2000, which stated that only those sentenced to life imprisonment without daytime isolation are eligible for summary procedure. This series of reforms gave the current Article 442 of the Italian Code of Criminal Procedure.
Following the national courts’ decisions, the four lifers separately filed a complaint to the ECHR. Two of the applicants, Mr Gelsomino and Mr Prinari, argued that Italian Courts had deprived them of obtaining a lighter sentence by refusing their trial under the simplified summary procedure. The other two, Mr Cotena and Mr Rotolo, complained that their national courts violated the summary procedure law by failing to apply the more lenient sentence. Mr Cotena further argued that if his trial had ended earlier while the 1999 law was still applicable, he would have received the lenient sentence instead of life imprisonment.
Upholding the Italian courts’ decisions, the ECHR explained that:
[T]he Constitutional Court and the plenary Court of Cassation had separately specifically held that the benefit of the more lenient penalty of thirty years’ imprisonment could be granted only to those who had made a request to be tried under the summary procedure while Law no. 479 of 1999 had been in force and had been sentenced afterwards. Therefore the applicants had not been entitled to a reduction of their sentence via a review of the enforcement orders.
Additionally, the European court highlighted that when filing their demands to their national courts, the applicants failed to respect the legal timeline of six months. According to the court, this legal deadline runs from the earlier decisions in the applicants’ cases before the national courts. Hence, as the four applicants filed their requests “more than six months after those decisions in the cases before the lower Italian courts”, the ECHR considered them “lodged out of time” and found the applications inadmissible.
