Italian Supreme Court of Cassation, Criminal Section VI, No. 26153/2011, 26 April 2011

Recourse against conviction for crimes of domestic violence and personal injuries, victim the wife of the defendant. Socio-cultural condition that influenced the illicit conducts and defendant's subjective element.

Art. 572 Italian criminal code

Attitudes deriving from subcultures in which self-representations of gender superiority and “master-father/husband” claims survive cannot be relevant neither for the purposes of investigating the subjective element of the crime (in this case, general malice) nor the defendant’s imputability.
On the contrary, such attitudes, if persistent and unresponsive to the change in custom and to the existence of laws that have progressively implemented the constitutional principle of equality between spouses, far from being considerable as a mitigating or exculpatory factor, must be assessed in relation to the intensity of the malice and the extent of the suffering and damage experienced by the cohabiting family members.

(In the case in question, the defence of the defendant, who was an Italian national, considered the unlawful conducts to be an expression of his socio-cultural situation, arguing that there was no subjective element, since the consideration of his wife as an “object of his exclusive property” was the result of a sub-cultural condition.)