A homeless man in Italy will avoid jail time and a fine worth about 25 times the value of the cheese and sausages he tried to steal, after the Supreme Court ruled he shouldn’t be punished.
Roman Ostriakov was caught stealing from a supermarket in Genoa in 2011. According to BBC, he paid for some breadsticks but tried to walk out with two pieces of cheese and a package of sausage.
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Ostriakov, who is of Ukrainian descent, was convicted, sentenced to six months behind bars and fined US $115 last year for stealing US $4.50 worth of food.
In its ruling Monday, Italy’s Supreme Court of Cassation said people like Ostriakov “shouldn’t be punished if, forced by need, they steal small quantities of food in order to meet the basic requirement of feeding themselves.”
“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 Washington Post reported the decision reading.
BBC reported the court’s ruling justified Ostriakov’s actions by saying they were done in a “state of necessity.”
“The condition of the defendant and the circumstances in which the seizure of merchandise took place prove that he took possession of that small amount of food in the face of an immediate and essential need for nourishment, acting therefore in a state of necessity,” the court said, according to BBC’s translation of the ruling.
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An editorial in Italy’s La Stampa compared 30-year-old Ostriakov to the character of Jean Valjean in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables — a poor French peasant sentenced to years of hard labour for stealing a loaf of bread.
“For the supreme judges, the right to survival has prevailed over the right to property,” read a translation of La Stampa editor Mixumum Gramellini’s editorial.
Gramellini hearkened back to 1970s, when left-wing youth plundered supermarkets “with impunity” in the name of proletarian ideals, but made off with “caviar and champagne” instead of what was necessary to survive.
“Now, people don’t steal to pursue an ideal, but to fill up their stomach,” he wrote.
An op-ed in Corriere della Sera, on the other hand, criticized the judicial process that ruled Ostriakov shouldn’t be punished for trying to survive.
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