I doubt if Cicero would be impressed. OK, maybe the post title is a little OTT but I’ve posted in the past about the many weird and whacky rulings of Italian judges, most particularly relating to rape and sexual harassment. Well I picked this up from Reuters recently and it’s the mind-alterning icing on the italian legal hash cake. It transpires that a man who wishes to collect a pre-agreed payout of around 450,000 Euros from his insurance company has been told to come back in 14 months to determine the result of his case. The catch? He has 6 months to live and wants to use the money to ease his final days.. If this wasn’t bad enough it turns out that his claim goes back over a decade
when he was left paralyzed by a motorcycle accident. Confined to a wheelchair, he subsequently developed a lethal infection of the spine…
If this was a freak incident of italian legal woe then it would be more tolerable. However, in Italy it takes on average 3,041 days to obtain a definitive sentence in a civil case.