President clarifies constitutional limits on the justice minister’s powers, specifically pardons, a day after the Supreme Court finalised the 14-year, nine-month sentence for jeweller Mario Roggero. The jeweller shot dead two fleeing robbers during a 2021 heist.
President Sergio Mattarella received Justice Minister Carlo Nordio at the Quirinale on Thursday to clarify the constitutional limits on the minister’s powers regarding pardons, after Nordio moved to open proceedings to pardon jeweller Mario Roggero.
Roggero, 72, was sentenced to 14 years and nine months in prison for shooting dead two robbers as they fled his jewellery shop during a 2021 heist, and for wounding a third. The Supreme Court upheld the sentence on Wednesday, making the verdict definitive.
A constitutional line
According to a statement from the presidential palace, Mattarella stressed that the Constitution reserves the power to grant pardons exclusively to the President of the Republic, a position confirmed by the Constitutional Court in Ruling 200 of 2006. The meeting appeared designed to settle, unambiguously, where the authority to act on Roggero’s case actually lies, after Nordio’s move to open proceedings raised questions over the boundary between the justice ministry’s role and the president’s own constitutional prerogative.
The length of Roggero’s sentence has caused widespread dismay since it was handed down. Parliamentary whips from the parties of the ruling majority launched a petition urging the justice ministry to request a pardon on his behalf.
Defence Minister Guido Crosetto, a senior figure in Premier Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy (FdI), went further, writing on X that every possibility should be explored to allow Roggero to return home. He described the verdict as unjust, incomprehensible and difficult to accept.
Roggero expected to turn himself in
With the sentence now definitive, attention has turned to when Roggero will begin serving it. His brother, Dante Roggero, said the jeweller would turn himself in once the formal request for his incarceration is made.
The case has become a lightning rod in the wider debate over self-defence law in Italy, with figures across the governing coalition publicly questioning whether the punishment fits the circumstances.
