PERSONAL INJURY. - There is personal injury in Italian criminal law when, without intent to kill, one causes another a harm to the body, health or mental state. If the intent to kill is present, there is attempted homicide.
For the CIC and for moralists there does not exist a personal injury as a sin or crime in itself, but personal injury falls within the class of crimes that concern violations of another's person (in bona corporis). This is due to the fact that the CIC, treating more than anything else of specifically ecclesiastical crimes, generally refers, at least for the application of penalties, to the laws of individual States (cann. 2198; 2223 § 3, n. 2), as regards crimes that are considered by state penal codes, and to the fact that moralists consider the moral side more than the juridical one, stopping therefore in this matter at the examination of the elements common to all injustices, of which personal injury is a part. Some particular element is nevertheless furnished by moralists when they speak of mutilation, attempted homicide, etc., and some other also by the CIC in Book V, e.g., at cann. 2333; 2337 § 2; 2341; 2343 §§ 1-4; 2350 § 1; 2351 § 1; 2353; 2354 §§ 1-2; however, in the one and the other case there is lacking a specific treatment of personal injury in the technical sense, a treatment which the Italian Penal Code instead has, Book II at Title XII, on crimes against the person. In reality not even it gives an express definition: it is however easy to deduce it from the whole of Title XII and above all from art. 582 first paragraph, which says that "whoever causes anyone a personal injury from which a disease of the body or mind derives" is subject to the penalties determined therein and in art. 583. It is necessary to hold that this norm is subject to two reservations: the first, that it is never possible to speak juridically of personal injury except when the act that produces it terminates in a subject other than the agent (therefore attempted suicide, self-mutilation, self-poisoning, etc., are not personal injury); and the second, that whenever it produces bodily or mental disease, each of the actions listed in Title XII as distinct from personal injury (beatings, brawls, abandonment of a person of minor age and of incapacitated persons or of newborns, omission of rescue, reduction of a person to slavery, kidnapping, illegal arrest, undue limitations of personal liberty, arbitrary searches and inspections, private violence, threats, state of necessity produced by violence) constitutes, in addition to its specific crime, also personal injury. In this sense one may see arts. 549, 550, 554, 588 and 559. It is indispensable in any case, for there to be personal injury, that the action produce the disease, whether bodily or mental, in a relationship of cause to effect. Nor does it escape notice that every personal injury as described is, morally speaking, a violation of commutative justice normally grave. As regards the moral responsibility of actions injurious to the person, whether intentional or culpable, and the circumstances that aggravate or diminish it (see also arts. 582-83, 586-88, 590), it should be remembered that for conscience it is the subjective element that matters, more than what appears in the external forum.
The CIC considers personal injury also the violation of the privilege of the canon, that is, of the life, dignity, liberty of a cleric or religious (can. 2343; see also PRIVILEGI DEI CHIERICI) and punishes it with various penalties. In the penalties it groups together personal injury in abortion, self-harm for suicidal purpose, personal injury in dueling, in violent abduction, etc. The penalty is proportionate to the degree of culpability also for preterintentional or culpable injury.
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Lorenzo Simeone