La depenalizzazione fra giudice penale e amministrazione (e giudice dell’opposizione)

Decriminalization is one of the best fields of study for a comparison between (criminal) courts’ decisions and decisions of the administration, and between the latter and the (civil or administrative) courts’ decisions on appeals against administrative penalties. On the occasion of the 1981 decriminalization process, Italian law-maker made a clear choice in favor of exporting the penal model onto administrative penalties: however, a number of ’simplifications’were introduced by way of case-law, which have been applied not only in administrative penalty procedures (and, therefore, within the administration’s decision process), but also in subsequent appeal proceedings (i.e. in court rulings). The ECHR’s case law entailed the overcoming of the formalistic idea that administrative penalties provided for decriminalized illicit acts are at all case more favorable than the original criminal penalty; nevertheless, in this area there is still a space reserved for the administration’s (and the administration’s alone) evaluations, which as such are capable of defining decriminalization choices.