Chilean legal scholars have generally endorsed the possibility of mitigating or exempting criminal responsibility in cases of theft committed as means to overcome a situation of necessity, such as being hungry, cold or sick. The main legal doctrines to solve these cases are the justification of necessity or the excuse of duress of circumstances, regulated on Article 10 of the Chilean Criminal Code. Legal courts, however, have largely restrained from applying these rules and doctrines. Indeed, by analyzing a large sample of judicial decisions made between the years 2004 and 2019, we identify a series of extralegal criteria used by courts to reject the application of ‘famished theft’ doctrines. While in this study we do not investigate the causes of this judicial restraint, we conclude by proposing three hypotheses.