LENOCINIO. — It is an intermediary activity serving the lust of others with a view to personal profit.
In legal doctrine, the notion of l. as a crime is defined in different ways. Some find the reason for its punishability in incitement to corruption and prostitution undertaken for profit; hence the need to suppress it not so much because of the harm and injury to modesty, as because of the offender’s subjective dangerousness.
Carrara defines the protection established against l. as protection of minors against the snares of corruption, not with regard to the venality or habitual nature of the act, but in consideration of the need to defend the individual modesty of minors; therefore not in order to protect public morality and the corresponding right of society.
Listz establishes the basis of punishment in the social interest, since it is necessary for sexual life to be contained within certain limits in defence of the order of families and the psychophysical health of growing generations.
Manzini determines the object of penal protection, with respect to the crimes of procuring, as the interest of the State directed toward guaranteeing the juridical goods of public morality and good conduct, insofar as these concern public modesty and sexual honour, against every form of parasitism on corruption, whether this consists in l. in the proper sense, in the exploitation of prostitutes, or in the so-called trafficking of women and minors.
It may therefore be concluded that the figure of l., as a crime, exists when, given the particular conditions arising from inexperience or weakness of character in which the passive subject finds himself, or because of the particular nature of the means employed, the act appears injurious to public and private interests.
Already suppressed in Roman law, l. was punished in the decrees of Paul IV and Sixtus V by the death penalty; but practice mitigated the penalty, reducing it to exile or flogging. The criminal constitution of Charles V punishes the leno with relegation, the punishment of the beam around the neck, the cutting off of the ears, and other penalties.
The current Italian Penal Code regulates the matter of l. in arts. 531–40 and 544. The cases provided for are: non-violent l. of minors or mentally deficient persons; non-violent familial l. of a normal adult woman; violent l.; the exploitation of prostitutes; the non-violent or fraudulent trafficking of women and minors; and the violent or fraudulent trafficking of women and minors.
The CIC likewise provides for the crime of l., but, in imposing penalties, distinguishes between cases in which it is perpetrated by laymen, by clerics not in sacris, or by clerics in sacris.
Canon 2357 § 1 establishes, in fact, that laymen convicted of l. are ipso facto infames, in addition to the other penalties (ferendae sententiae) that the Ordinary may deem appropriate to impose.
Canon 2358, on the other hand, concerns clerics in minoribus ordinibus constituti, who therefore have not yet assumed the obligation of celibacy. By virtue of this canon, they, if guilty of some crime contra sextum, in addition to any ferendae sententiae penalties they may possibly have incurred, like laymen, for the crimes contemplated by the preceding canon 2357, must be punished by their superior in proportion to their guilt and also, if necessary, by dismissal from the clerical state—a dismissal that is a genuine expulsion, to be carried out by a condemnatory sentence. The reason for such severity lies both in their demonstrated unsuitability, given the type of crime committed, to undertake with dignity the responsibility and burden of Holy Orders, and in the particular standard of life required by their state.
Severity is further intensified when one considers canon 2359 § 2, which provides for the crime of l. committed by clerics in sacris, that is, by the subdeacon, deacon, and priest, whether secular or regular.
Such persons, in fact, must be punished by suspension, infamia iuris, deprivation of office, benefice, and any position they may hold in the Church, and, in the most serious cases, deposition. All these penalties are ferendae sententiae, to be imposed by a condemnatory sentence.
BIBL. V. Manzini, Trattato di diritto penale italiano secondo il Codice del 1930, VII, Torino 1936, p. 433 ff.; M. Manfredini, Delitti contro la moralità e il buon costume, in Trattato di diritto penale a cura di E. Florian, Milano 1934, p. 225 ff.; I. Chelodi - P. Ciprotti, Ins canonicum de delictis et poenis, Vicenza-Trento 1943, p. 128. Francesco Ercolani