An offence against a police officer is never a minor offence

Contempt of a public official is never a minor offence. It is therefore entirely legitimate, from a constitutional point of view, to exclude this offence from the scope of application of the ground for non-punishment. This is the conclusion reached by the Constitutional Court in Judgment No. 186, filed on Thursday 5 November. The issues had been raised by the courts of Ancona and Brescia and by the Court of Appeal of Florence, which argued that, following the Cartabia reform, the ground for non-punishability applies to violence or threats against a political, administrative or judicial body and, by virtue of Judgment No. 172 of 2025, also to offences of violence and resisting a public official, and therefore considering it unreasonable that the prohibition on applying the defence to the less serious offence of contempt should be maintained.

The Constitutional Court, however, emphasised the distinctive nature of the offence of contempt compared with the other two: indeed, the offence of contempt is aimed at protecting a different interest, the honour and prestige of the public official, and not their physical safety, and therefore involves a different type of conduct. The nature of the offence that gives rise to the administrative action is decisive; in this case, the action suffers damage, and is not merely placed at risk by the perpetrator’s conduct, because the offence against a public official, in its new wording, is established only if the offence is perceived by several people.

It thus becomes clear that the offence must ‘extend beyond the scope of the subjective dimension of the relationship between the perpetrator and the victim, and relate instead to the functional and social dimension of the damage caused to the administration’s reputation, and therefore to its proper functioning ’.

It is precisely this public dimension of the offence that characterises its negative value, consisting of the loss of credibility for the administration that inevitably results from it, and makes the legislator’s decision to exclude the offence of contempt, if committed against members members of the public security forces or the judicial police, from the scope of application of the ‘minor offence’ defence.

Moreover, the law provides for the extinction of the offence of contempt when the offender has compensated for the damage, thereby allowing consideration to be given to conduct which, in practice and in light of the offender’s subsequent behaviour, has been characterised by a modest degree of offensiveness.