Ostriakov was stopped on his way out of the supermarket with the cheese and dogs in his pocket after a customer noticed he only paid for some breadsticks, reported him to management.
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Originally, Ostriakov was sentenced to six months in prison and recieved a 100 euro fine ($115 dollars).
Roman Ostriakov, 36, couldnt afford anything to eat, so he stole less than five dollars worth of cheese and sausage from a supermarket in Genoa, Italy in 2011.
Italy’s highest court of appeals ruled this week that stealing food is not a crime if it’s a minimal amount of food taken just to stave off extreme hunger. The verdict was upheld on appeal in 2015.
The decision came after a homeless man was prosecuted for attempting to shoplift food – because it was the only reliable way he could eat.
“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. Only one justice voted to hear the appeal.Its 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 thousand of homeless people, Karakatsanis said.
An opinion piece in Corriere Della Sera says statistics suggest 615 people are added to the ranks of the poor in Italy every day – it was “unthinkable that the law should not take note of reality”.
Goods worth less than £3 are surely not worth the time it took for the case to undergo three rounds in the courts.
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Ostriakov got more than what he sought, which is to reduce the sentence to attempted theft from the original charge of theft because he was caught before he could leave the store. It ruled that stealing small amounts of food to sustain a vital need is not a crime.
