The Italian Case: When the Executioner Disappears, but Death Remains
Italy was one of the important laboratories in the history of the abolition of the death penalty. The Zanardelli Code of 1889, which came into force in 1890, abolished capital punishment in the Kingdom of Italy. It was a major decision, rooted in the Italian Enlightenment tradition and in the belief that the state should not answer one killing with another legally sanctioned killing.
Yet Italian history immediately demonstrates that abolishing the death penalty and abolishing the possibility that the state itself may cause someone's death are two different things.
Gaetano Bresci is enough to illustrate the problem.
On July 29, 1900, Bresci assassinated King Umberto I in Monza. On August 29, he was sentenced to life imprisonment and transferred to the prison on the island of Santo Stefano. On May 22, 1901, he died in his cell. The official version holds that he hanged himself; Treccani describes his death as “possibly suicide,” while records relating to his imprisonment are missing, as are, subsequently, records concerning his trial.
This does not prove that Bresci was murdered. But it raises a question that goes beyond the individual case: what does it really mean when the state removes the death penalty from its legal arsenal but continues to hold the lives of prisoners in its hands?
That is where the problem begins.
Italy Abolished the Death Penalty. Then It Brought It Back
History did not follow a straight line. The abolition introduced by the Zanardelli Code was not permanent. In 1930, the Rocco Code restored the death penalty, which remained part of Italian law under Fascism.
After the fall of the regime, capital punishment was abolished again for ordinary crimes, and the process of eliminating the death penalty from the Italian legal system was completed at the constitutional level with Constitutional Law No. 1 of 2007.
Today, Article 27 of the Italian Constitution is unequivocal: “The death penalty is not permitted.” The same article establishes that punishment may not consist of treatment contrary to human dignity and must be aimed at the rehabilitation of the convicted person.
The principle is therefore clear. But precisely for that reason, it becomes interesting to examine what happens outside the death penalty.
Punishment Is One Thing. Death Is Another.
The death penalty is a specific legal mechanism: a court sentences a person to death and the state carries out that sentence. There is a procedure, a judicial authority, a conviction, and an official act declaring that the person is to be killed.
When capital punishment is abolished, that procedure disappears. The state, however, continues to possess the legitimate monopoly on the use of force and retains institutions—police, armed forces, prisons, security agencies—that may, under certain circumstances, use lethal force.
This is where the categories must be kept separate. Sentencing someone to death is one thing; a person dying as a result of an action by a state agent is another; deliberately eliminating someone outside any judicial proceeding is something else again.
Confusing these situations means missing the central point: abolishing the death penalty does not mean abolishing every possible death caused by public power.
The Citizen in the Hands of the State
The problem becomes particularly clear when a person enters a state institution. A prisoner is deprived of liberty and cannot choose where to go, whom to speak with, or how to escape the authority of the officers in charge. His or her daily existence depends upon the public apparatus.
For this reason, a death in custody cannot automatically be treated as a simple accident or an unavoidable event. This does not mean, of course, that every prisoner who dies has been killed. It means that the state's responsibility becomes necessarily greater when the person who dies was entirely under its custody.
That is why modern democracies have developed systems of oversight, medical care, legal safeguards, independent courts, and investigative obligations. The state must not only refrain from arbitrary killing; it must also be capable of demonstrating that it did not kill arbitrarily.
When Force Becomes Abuse
The problem does not disappear outside prison. Police officers and military personnel may find themselves in situations in which the use of force, including lethal force, is legally permitted. The mere fact that a state agent caused someone's death therefore does not automatically make that death an execution.
The real question concerns the legitimacy of the intervention: whether the use of force was justified, necessary, and proportionate; whether the officers acted according to the rules; and, above all, whether an independent and effective investigation followed the death.
These are precisely the questions that distinguish the rule of law from the mere exercise of force. The rule of law is not defined by the fact that state agents never kill anyone. It is defined by the state's ability to subject even those who legitimately exercise coercive power to scrutiny and accountability.
And Then Comes the Shadow
As long as a procedure exists, a citizen can at least know where responsibility is supposed to be found. There is a judge, a file, a report, a ruling. But what happens when power decides to step outside the procedure?
This is where the history of extrajudicial executions begins. A person is not sentenced to death: he is arrested, disappears, interrogated, tortured, and killed. Sometimes the state may even deny that he was ever detained.
At that point, we are no longer dealing with capital punishment, but with something different and more radical: the removal of a human being from the protection of the law.
Latin America and the State Without a Court
The twentieth century provides extreme examples of this mechanism. During the military dictatorships of South America, particularly in the 1970s, state apparatuses turned political repression into a clandestine system of kidnappings, illegal detention, torture, disappearances, and killings.
In Argentina, CONADEP documented 8,960 cases of forced disappearance and identified approximately 340 clandestine detention centers. The commission concluded that the repression followed a systematic plan organized at the highest levels of the armed forces.
Here, the concept of the death penalty becomes almost secondary. No law was needed to declare that a particular person had to die. It was enough for someone to decide that the person was an enemy.
From that moment on, procedure could be replaced by secrecy.
The Difference Between the Executioner and the Kidnapper
The executioner belongs to a judicial machine that has publicly declared its decision; the kidnapper belongs to a machine designed to prevent that decision from ever being publicly examined.
The difference is not merely legal. It concerns the very nature of power. In the first case, the state claims that it has acted according to a procedure that it publicly recognizes. In the second, it establishes that a person can be eliminated without anyone having to know, review, or challenge that decision.
This is why extrajudicial executions represent a different threat from capital punishment formally established by law: they do not merely make punishment more violent; they eliminate the need for punishment itself.
The Problem of Intelligence Agencies
This is where the discussion inevitably reaches intelligence and security agencies. A state may have intelligence services, covert operations, and information that cannot immediately be made public. But secrecy is not a license to kill.
The fundamental challenge for any democracy is to prevent secrecy from becoming a space in which ordinary rules cease to exist. If a state agent can justify any action simply by saying that it was part of a secret operation, secrecy no longer protects the state. It protects whoever has abused the state.
Death Without a Sentence
A state can therefore abolish the death penalty while retaining institutions through which a person may die as a result of state action. This does not mean that every such case is a “disguised death penalty.” That would be a historical and legal oversimplification.
It means something more precise: abolishing capital punishment removes one legal form of state power over life; it does not automatically eliminate every possibility of abuse of the state's coercive power.
The real safeguard is therefore much more complex. It is not enough to write that the death penalty is prohibited. A system must exist in which the police officer, soldier, prison official, intelligence operative, civil servant, and minister all know that someone can demand an accounting of the consequences of their actions.
Civilization Is Not the Absence of Violence
Perhaps this is what we often forget. A state does not become civilized simply because it stops hanging, shooting, or injecting condemned prisoners. It becomes civilized when it accepts that its own power must also be subject to control.
The death penalty can be abolished by legislation. Illegal state killing can be confronted only through something much harder: independent institutions, transparency, accountability, an independent judiciary, journalism, archives, historical memory, and citizens willing to ask questions.
Because the real problem is not only the executioner.
It is who controls power when the executioner is gone.
And Bresci Returns
That is why, after crossing the history of the twentieth century, we can return to Gaetano Bresci.
Bresci was sentenced to life imprisonment. He was not executed. He died in his cell.
The official version says suicide. The circumstances of his death have never been completely clarified, and some documentation concerning his imprisonment and trial is missing. That does not authorize us to turn doubt into certainty.
But that is precisely where the case becomes meaningful.
When a man dies in the hands of the state, the question should never be only how he died. It should also be how much we are still able to know about that death.
A democracy does not protect citizens merely by preventing the state from sentencing them to death. It protects them by ensuring that, if a citizen ever dies in state custody, no locked door, missing file, or secret can make it impossible to discover the truth.
The death penalty can be abolished.
The executioner can be dismissed.
The gallows can be dismantled.
But the problem of power remains.
And the most disturbing question is no longer:
“Who has the right to sentence a man to death?”
It is this:
“Who controls those who have the power to kill a man without having to sentence him to death?”
That is where the real history of the modern state begins.
