Many cases of tragic crimes that come to light, outrage and anger us – Tempi, Glyka Nera, Kolonos, Pispirigou – looking for “real punishments” for the perpetrators as a society. Life imprisonment is one of the highest penalties for crimes in Greece, yet the real meaning of the term does not represent its name. What does this sentence really mean and how “fair” is it for the heinous crimes?
Etymologically, the term lifetime comes from the words “equal” and “life” and means that something is equal to the time span of a person’s life. In Greek criminal law it is now the highest single penalty that can be imposed, after the death penalty was abolished in December 1993. In practice, the last execution took place on August 25, 1972.
But according to article 105 of the Greek Criminal Code, the concept is fictitious, that is, those sentenced to life imprisonment can be released if they have served at least twenty (20) years of their sentence, or eighteen (18) years, according to a law passed in 2021, or if they have exceeded the age of 70 their.
According to data published in September 2018, every year our country ranks first with the most life expectancy in the relevant table of the Council of Europe. Of the 9,000 prisoners in 2018, a thousand were sentenced to life, a record number. Of course, the number is large and matching it with the indicators of serious crime does not show that it is working downwards. Compared to other European countries in imposing life sentences that year, the gap with Greece was large, especially considering that Sweden, Portugal, the Czech Republic and Austria have no more than 40 life sentences, while the whole of Germany has only 140. .
Lawyer Constantinos Pavlidis explains to Parallaxi what applies to life imprisonment in Greece and the changes brought about by the new Penal Code.
“First of all, we must emphasize that there is no such thing as a lifelong stay of someone in a penitentiary. The new Penal Code reinstated life imprisonment as the only (inexorably threatened) sentence for certain crimes, such as manslaughter in a calm state of mind, aggravated rape, as well as aggravated robbery. But could lifers hypothetically be lifers? So someone who was sentenced to this sentence should spend the rest of his life in prison? The answer is unequivocally no, as confirmed by the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights, which recently ruled in an appeal against Hungary that prisoners should have the hope that at some point they will regain their freedom even after several years. Without this hope, the person sentenced to life imprisonment does not have the motivation of imprisonment, that is, remorse for his criminal action, an element that constitutes the dominant characteristic of any liberal prison system.
In fact, the Court of Strasbourg, going one step further, emphasized that in the event that the member states of the Council of Europe do not have a legislative provision for the release of the convicted person at some point in his life, either through the institution of conditional release or pardon, then this constitutes inhuman and degrading treatment of him, which is prohibited under Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
Going a step further, in fact, the European Court of Human Rights argued that the establishment of a special mechanism is required to guarantee a review no later than 25 years after the imposition of a life sentence, with further revisions.
At the national level, in addition to the recognition of mitigating factors by the Court for the “breaking” of lives, there is also the institution of parole, which is dominant in the imposition of the sentence. Based on this institution, the person sentenced to life imprisonment cannot remain in the penitentiary for more than 20 years, while if he has been sentenced cumulatively to more sentences (e.g. twice for life) he can in any case be released if he has served 25 years. These limits are reduced in the event that the convicted person demonstrates good behavior during his stay in the penitentiary, so for life sentences he can be released after 18 years.”
Relevant Articles
