So is Mario Roggero a hero, or is he a murderer? This is the question, as paradoxical as it is revealing, that has been inflaming social media and poisoning political debate for days. On one side, the shopkeeper turned symbol of the courageous citizen who rebels against an abuse by doing alone what the State does not know how to do for him; on the other, the angry man, quick to use a weapon, who ultimately turns into a killer. Both images are inadequate to explain what really happened. The final sentence of fourteen years and nine months pronounced by the Court of Cassation says neither one thing nor the other. It says something much more limited and, precisely for this reason, much more important: it identifies the exact moment when legitimate defense ends and the monopoly of force belonging to the State begins again.
The sentences have never denied the right of the assaulted jeweler to react
The sentences have never denied that Roggero had the right to react to the robbery in his jewelry store. Rather, they established that when he fired the last shots the two robbers – armed with a toy gun and a knife – were already fleeing in the parking lot and that, to use the judges’ words, the aggressive action was already “completely concluded.” Everything else – the invectives, slogans, sit-ins, party declarations – has overlapped this elementary fact without managing to undermine it.
The Roggero trial is not a trial of legitimate defense: it is a trial about its limit. That limit is as old as the very idea of law. The Digest sums it up in the famous formula vim vi repellere licet: it is lawful to repel force with force. But Roman jurists already clarified that the reaction is justified only as long as the offense lasts. Cicero, in Pro Milone, could evoke that law “unwritten, but born with us” that authorizes everyone to save themselves; however, it presupposed an aggression still in progress, not an enemy who is retreating.
There remains pity. But pity and anger cannot become the criterion to measure responsibility
For this reason, the boundary drawn by Italian judges is nothing eccentric. All liberal legal systems allow more or less broad forms of self-defense, but none recognize a right to reprisal. The formulas change – the reasonable force of English law, the American castle doctrine – and the balances between individual freedom and public security change; the principle that the lawfulness of defense depends on the actuality of the danger does not change.
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Even Italian jurisprudence, beyond political controversy, has moved with considerable consistency. In 2015, in Ponte di Nanto, in Vicenza, the gas station attendant Graziano Stacchio intervened while the assault on a jewelry store was still underway and killed one of the robbers: he was not even brought to trial. Three years later, in Arezzo, the tire dealer Fredy Pacini shot a thief who had broken into his workshop at night, where he was now sleeping for fear of continuous intrusions: the case was dismissed. On the opposite side was the case of Angelo Peveri, an entrepreneur from Piacenza who in 2011 shot a diesel thief who was already immobilized and harmless. The Court of Cassation excluded legitimate defense because that reaction no longer aimed to neutralize a danger, but to inflict punishment. Roggero fits within this interpretative line; he does not represent a turning point, but its most recent application.
The public discussion continues instead to oscillate between two caricatures, both reassuring. Roggero becomes, depending on convenience, the symbol of Italy that does not surrender to criminals or the emblem of private justice that threatens civil coexistence. The law, by its nature, distrusts symbols. It judges facts, not flags. Beccaria understood this clearly: when decisions are driven by collective sentiment, punishment ceases to be justice and risks turning into revenge. Clemency is a legitimate constitutional institution, and the Quirinale will assess whether the conditions for granting it exist. However, making it today a tool for political mobilization means shifting the discussion from the field of law to that of emotion.
Roman jurists already clarified that the reaction is justified as long as the offense lasts
There remains pity, which no sentence can erase, for a seventy-two-year-old man who has entered prison. But the law exists precisely to prevent pity as well as anger from becoming the criterion by which responsibility is measured. The boundary between defense and revenge is inevitably thin and fragile. But it remains one of the boundaries on which the rule of law rests. If it is erased, citizens’ freedom is not strengthened; instead, what legal civilization has entrusted for centuries to the law ends up being entrusted to force.
