ITALY:He is a Sardinian - ergo he is entitled to a light sentence for rape. Sardinian public figures and politicians reacted with outrage yesterday to a German court ruling which effectively stated that an Italian defendant's Sardinian origins had to be taken into account when it came to sentencing him for rape.
The Sardinian in question is Maurizio Pusceddu (29), sentenced one year ago to six years' imprisonment in a court in Buckeburg, Germany. During his trial, Pusceddu had admitted to sequestering, raping, torturing and humiliating his Lithuanian girlfriend over a three-week period, merely because he suspected that she had betrayed him with another man.
In evidence to the police, the unnamed woman reported that not only had Pusceddu locked her up, raped and gang-raped her but that he had also covered her body with cigarette burns, poured vinegar on to her wounds and on occasions urinated on her.
Under German law, Judge Baron Burries von Hammerstein could have issued a sentence of up to 15 years. However, the judge took into account Pusceddu's partial confession, the fact that he had no previous criminal record and, controversially, his Sardinian origins. In his judgement, Baron von Hammerstein wrote: "one must take into account the cultural and ethnic characteristics of the accused. He is a Sardinian. The roles of men and women in his country certainly cannot be used as an excuse but they must be considered as an extenuating circumstance."
The case came to light only this week, one year after the trial in Germany, because Pusceddu has requested that he might serve his sentence in Italy. It was only when his lawyer, Anna Maria Busia, was preparing to present Pusceddu's prison transfer request to a Cagliari court of appeal that she received the full text of Baron von Hammerstein's original ruling.
Even though her client benefited from a reduction of his sentence, allegedly because of his Sardinian origins, Ms Busia still described the sentence as "racist". Junior justice minister Luigi Manconi, himself a Sardinian, called the ruling an "example of differential racism" whilst the president of the region of Sardinia, Renato Soru, commented: "this whole story just shows that there are idiots everywhere".
Former Cagliari footballer and modern-day Sardinian folk hero Gigi Riva expressed his disappointment, saying: "I thought that all those cliches about the island had been long forgotten. Clearly I was wrong."