Another prominent example of Greece’s often lenient penal code again arose this month with the announcement that a 49-year-old inmate has had a “life sentence” imposed on him for homicide overturned and docked down to a 15-year maximum sentence.
Although revisions to the penal code were undertaken after 2019 by the current center-right government towards the direction of imposing harsher sentences for felony and certain misdemeanor convictions, along with stricter rules for granting probation and parole, a “life sentence” in Greece does not automatically mean spending one’s days behind bars until death. Rather, the maximum incarceration can be suspended upon appeal for parole.
Specifically, the inmate was first handed down a life imprisonment for the murder of his 36-year-old cell mate at the Nigrita prison, near the northern city of Serres, in July 2019.
Upon reviewing the case on appeal, the mixed jury-justice appellate court in Thessaloniki found him guilty of intentional homicide but, by a 4–3 majority, recognized what it called a “mitigating circumstance of subsequent good behavior”, as defined in the criminal code, and imposed a 15-year prison sentence. The convicted man returned to prison to serve the remainder of his sentence.
According to the indictment, the murder was caused dispute over a trivial reason. Based on forensic evidence, the 36-year-old victim, a Georgian national, was found strangled and bearing 58 severe blows to various parts of his body. The main defendant was the 49-year-old man, a Russian national, who at the time was serving a sentence for robberies.
Another inmate, a Georgian man, was also charged in the same case but was acquitted by the trial court.
In his testimony, the 49-year-old denied the charge, emphasizing that he became involved in the incident in order to separate the two men who were fighting.
