Catastrophic moral damage compensable even if the agony lasts only a few hours

The catastrophic moral damage must be compensated even if the agony lasts only a few hours, when the victim remains conscious and perceives the seriousness of his or her condition and the approach of death.

This was affirmed by the Court of Cassation in its 16890 judgment, published on 29 May 2026, on the compensation due to the relatives of a minor who fell down the stairwell of an abandoned building in the municipality of Naples.

The incident occurred in 2005: a young man broke into a rustic building (lacking, according to the trial reconstruction, adequate door closures and interior protection) and fell from the sixth floor, dying a few hours later. In the criminal trial, a general sentence for compensation and provisional compensation was pronounced, which was later upheld on appeal.

In the civil case, the Court of Appeal of Naples had confirmed the liability of the municipality, the municipal official, and the contractor, but had raised the minor's contributory negligence to 40% and excluded catastrophic damage, valuing survival for only three hours. The Court of Cassation overturned the decision and distinguished "terminal biological damage" from "catastrophic moral damage": the former requires survival for an appreciable time; the latter consists in the suffering deriving from awareness of the seriousness of the injuries and of the imminence of the end, so that it does not depend on the duration of agony. In terminal biological damage, the temporary impairment of the victim's psychophysical integrity in the period between the event and death is taken into account; in moral damage catastrophic damage, on the other hand, the clear perception of one's condition, i.e. the inner suffering caused by the awareness of the imminent end, is taken into account.

The Court of legitimacy referred to the preliminary findings indicated by the appellants, from which it emerged that the minor, after the fall, was conscious, called for help, complained of severe pain and spoke to his sister. In the presence of such awareness, the catastrophic moral damage must be examined and, if proven, liquidated, while the duration of agony is only relevant for quantification purposes. It is therefore erroneous, according to the Court of Cassation, to make the exclusion of this indemnity item automatically derive from the brevity of survival: if for terminal biological damage the time retains a selective role, for catastrophic moral damage the decisive datum is the consciousness of the victim, the intensity of which may affect the amount, but not the abstract indemnity of the injury.