Supreme Court: no leniency for those who assault health personnel

The offence of injury to healthcare personnel provided for in Article 583 quater, paragraph 2, of the Criminal Code is an autonomous offence and not an aggravating circumstance of the offence of personal injury. A different solution would be in conflict with Law No. 113 of 2020 (Provisions on safety for healthcare and social-health professions in the exercise of their functions), which introduced this offence to "strengthen the protection of the safety of healthcare professionals in the exercise of their functions" and to repress unlawful conduct that is not limited to harming "the legal asset of physical integrity", but which affects "collective safety".

In these terms, the Court of Cassation (sentence no. 39438 of 2025) confirmed the sentence by which the Court of Appeal of Reggio Calabria had sentenced a woman who had assaulted a doctor on duty at a hospital garrison, causing her an injury to her scalp and shoulder, with a prognosis of five days, for the crime of injury to health personnel and the crime of violence against a public official.

According to the defendant's defence counsel, the territorial court should have qualified their defendant's conduct as an aggravating circumstance of the crime of personal injury and not as an autonomous crime, with the consequent absorption of the crime of violence or threatening a public official (Article 336 of the Criminal Code) into the crime of injury to medical personnel. This argument misses the mark.

The Court of Cassation ruled that Article 336 of the Criminal Code 'only absorbs that minimum level of violence that is expressed against the public official to force him to perform an act contrary to his official duties' and that the aforementioned Article 583-quater 'outlines an autonomous incriminatory hypothesis for injuries to the detriment of health care professionals'. This is not without pointing out that Article 16 of Decree-Law No. 34 of 30 March 2023 (amending the aforementioned Article 583-quater) introduced a common aggravating circumstance (Article 61, number 11-octies of the Criminal Code) intended to be applied in cases of offences committed to the detriment of practitioners of the health and social-health professions and of anyone who performs auxiliary care, health assistance or rescue activities functional to the performance of such professions.

This is why, argues the Supreme Collegium, 'the legislator's clear intention to create a new incriminating figure emerges, enucleating from the broader and more general sphere of malicious injuries, a typical and autonomous fact, strongly characterised by the subjective qualification of the victim (public official) and the causal/functional connection of the latter with the injurious action (in the exercise or because of his functions or service)'.