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In Italy, for every day spent unjustly behind bars, 236 euros are paid. PHOTO: PIXABEY
She spent 3 years behind bars accused of exploitation of prostitutes, but was acquitted
Pyears after she was acquitted of a crime she did not commit, a 30-year-old Bulgarian woman will be compensated with about 240,000 euros. This was ruled by the Court of Cassation in Rome at the end of an odyssey that lasted several years.
The Naples daily Matino reported that five years ago a Bulgarian citizen with the conditional name Elena was charged with serious crimes. Along with four other people, three Bulgarians and an Albanian citizen, she was arrested in the town of Mondragone.
Their arrest was due to a judicial investigation in which they were accused of participating in a criminal group, enslaving other people, exploiting prostitution, kidnapping people. All five were arrested in 2013 as part of an investigation into a network of prostitutes imported from Eastern Europe into Italy. Women were forced into prostitution in the southern areas of Campania and Calabria.
Three years later, the trial ended with two convictions and three acquittals in a court in the southern city of Santa Maria Capua Vetere. Two of the accused were sentenced to 12 and 8 years in prison, while three other people, including Elena, were fully acquitted.
Meanwhile, however, Elena spent three years in prison. Therefore, after justifying himself to a lawyer, he asked to be compensated by the Italian State for his years behind bars.
The Naples Court of Appeal ruled in 2019 that she deserved to be compensated with 240 thousand euros for “unjust detention in prison.” The prosecution is challenging this decision. In February, however, the Constitutional Court in Rome ruled that the Bulgarian woman was entitled to compensation. Today, the 30-year-old woman lives in a municipality near Caserta, Campania region.
How and who in Italy has
right to compensation
for spending time unfairly behind bars? And how is prison time measured in money?
The Italian State recognizes the right to compensation for people unjustly imprisoned pending sentence. Very often, this can happen due to a magistrate’s error or for other reasons. However, being in prison for a magistrate’s mistake is quite different from an unjust detention. It refers to judicial measures unfairly applied to a person who is later acquitted.
There is a second case and it concerns a man who, although he was subsequently convicted, should not have been in prison during that time because there were no preconditions for his detention.
In the case of Bulgarian women, this is the first type of unjust detention in prison. The Italian Penal Code also stipulates the amount of compensation for this type of unjust detention. The amount of the compensation may not exceed 516,456 euros. Although the law specifies a maximum limit on compensation, it does not say exactly how much it falls in individual cases. Therefore, the rules of arithmetic are usually applied in justice. This leads to the amount owed for each day spent unfairly behind bars, ie 236 euros. They are obtained by dividing 516,456 euros by 2,190 days (six years is the maximum period of preventive detention).
If, for example, a person has been placed under house arrest for 2 years and then acquitted, the compensation for their unjust imprisonment is 172,148 euros. However, the Italian judiciary accepts this arithmetic calculation of compensation only as conditional. The judge who must judge you may consider that for some reason, such as severe psychological damage, the compensation can be increased.
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