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"  Today, Italian courts actually sentenced Silvio Berlusconi. He got a year in prison not for the crime everyone on this green earth has heard about, but for giving a wiretapped conversation about the unraveling of a bank takeover to his newspaper publisher brother Paolo, who himself received two years and three months for the same crime. The orgy-hosting former prime minister also faces other charges at the moment as well \u2014 your run of the mill bribing an opposing legislator to change allegiances and, yes, paying a young woman for sex (she was 17; the age of consent in Italy is 14). But let&amp;#039;s be honest: the man probably won&amp;#039;t be locked up for a minute. Italian imprisonment is fking strange \u2014 which, yes, is something someone could probably say about pretty much every system of locking men behind bars. But only in Italy (among the industrialized and supposedly sensible) can the courts sentence seven seismologists to six years in prison for not issuing a proper warning in time before the devastating but scientifically highly improbable 2009 earthquake in L&amp;#039;Aquila. (309 people died in the earthquake; the charge was manslaughter.) Or, as a 2011 New Yorker article about Berlusconi&amp;#039;s hedonism notes, as recent as 2007, give a man who murdered his wife only two days in jail after &amp;quot;their children testified that she had been disrespectful to him.&amp;quot; Or have one of 110 theater groups in Italian prisons that are comprised of mobsters and traffickers be so well-attended that, according to one prison director, &amp;quot;the prison [is] one of Rome&amp;#039;s top 10 theaters.&amp;quot;  But Berlusconi, unsurprisingly for a government official with billions of dollars, is not among the cell dwellers. He&amp;#039;s seen several cases cleared or declared beyond the statute of limitations. Though the courts refused to suspend his famous sex case for the sake of his campaign, and he does now have to his ex-wife $48 million a year. (He was none too thrilled.) But even for the crimes he has been convicted of, the courts have already shrunk what was originally a 4-year sentence for tax fraud down to a single year. The reasoning came from an amnesty law that tries to decrease prison over-crowding \u2014 which has become so rampant recently that the European Court of Human Rights found an Italian prison guilty of forcing four prisoners to share a 97-square-foot cell (that&amp;#039;s less than a 5x5 space for each of them) with irregular hot water and light. But that&amp;#039;s for people who can&amp;#039;t impede their sentences like Berlusconi can. He received that one-year tax fraud sentencing reduction after a six-year trial plagued by orchestrated delays. And he will undoubtedly seek to all ends a similar diminution of his latest sentence, since according to Reuters, &amp;quot;Under Italian law, he is not expected to serve any prison term until all possible appeal trials have been carried out.&amp;quot; As Berlusconi said of the tax fraud case, which he is protesting, too, &amp;quot;It is without any doubt a political verdict just as all the cases invented against me are political.&amp;quot; His appeal is pending. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a20363/berlusconi-no-jail-time/>