When the State Kills Even Without the Death Penalty

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.

How Permanent Power Is Born

Power does not always emerge from the places where we formally expect to find it. It does not necessarily coincide with a government, a minister, a parliament, or an election. Sometimes the most resilient forms of power emerge elsewhere: in the empty spaces, the hidden compartments of the system, the gray areas created by absence, inertia, complexity, and the inability of others to fully exercise their responsibilities.

This may be one of the most revealing ways to understand how permanent power takes shape.

Politics changes. Governments fall. Ministers are replaced. Parliamentary majorities shift. Local leaders are elected and eventually replaced. Yet part of the state continues to function, day after day, through bureaucracies, officials, experts, consultants, agencies, public companies, regulatory bodies, procedures, and networks of relationships.

That continuity is necessary. A modern state could not survive if every political change meant replacing the entire administrative machinery. The problem begins when administrative continuity turns into a permanent advantage of the machinery over politics.

Because those who remain acquire something those who arrive do not possess: memory.

They know the precedents, the procedures, the people, the files, the real timelines, the obstacles, the possible interpretations, and the practical ways of getting things done. They know which decisions can actually be implemented and which are likely to remain on paper. A politician may possess the formal authority to decide, but those who understand the machinery from the inside may possess part of the practical power required to turn that decision into reality.

This is where the process begins.

Not necessarily with a conspiracy. Not necessarily with a hidden command center. Not necessarily with someone deliberately setting out to build a "deep state."

Sometimes, all it takes is a vacuum.

Every complex system constantly produces empty spaces. There is a gap between political decisions and their implementation; between legislation and interpretation; between administration and oversight; between the center and the periphery; between the public and private sectors; between those who formally hold responsibility and those who possess the expertise needed to exercise it.

And every vacuum represents an opportunity for power.

Politics says what it wants to achieve. The administration must determine how to achieve it. The law establishes principles and rules, but someone must interpret and apply them. A public contract may be awarded, but someone must oversee its execution. A reform may be passed, but someone must turn it into concrete procedures. An emergency may require rapid decisions, concentrating expertise and authority in extraordinary structures.

At every stage, there is a space.

And that space can be occupied.

The crucial point is that whoever occupies an empty space does not necessarily have to seize power by force. They can simply become indispensable.

That is a far more sophisticated form of power.

If everyone depends on you to understand a problem, find a solution, interpret a regulation, retrieve a file, identify a precedent, or navigate an extraordinarily complex bureaucracy, your influence grows even if nobody has formally granted you political authority.

The power of expertise can therefore become the power of necessity.

And necessity creates dependency.

This mechanism is particularly visible in highly technical fields. Public finance, procurement, energy, healthcare, infrastructure, defense, financial regulation, and digital transformation require knowledge that cannot simply be improvised. The more complex the system becomes, the greater the advantage enjoyed by those who possess specialized knowledge—and especially by those who have accumulated it over many years.

Accumulated knowledge becomes a form of capital.

But there is an even more powerful form of capital: information.

Those who possess information others do not have have an advantage. Those who know where to find that information have an additional advantage. Those who also understand the history of decisions, the relationships between people, and the consequences of previous choices can become a kind of living memory of the organization.

And memory matters enormously in the exercise of power.

A minister may arrive today and be gone tomorrow. A senior official may have been there for years. A consultant may work across several administrations. An expert may advise governments belonging to completely different political camps. A professional may move from the public sector to the private sector and back again.

Power therefore begins to lose its purely institutional character and becomes networked.

It no longer belongs to a single person.

It belongs to relationships.

One official knows another. An official knows a consultant. The consultant knows a company. The company knows a public administrator. The administrator knows a parliamentarian. The parliamentarian knows a minister. The minister changes, but some of the relationships remain.

And this is where permanent power can emerge.

The network does not necessarily have to be clandestine. It does not necessarily have to be illegal. It can arise simply from repeated interaction, trust, mutual advantage, expertise, and continuity.

But once a network becomes sufficiently stable, it can begin to produce something resembling an autonomous apparatus.

Political power changes, while the network survives.

That is the decisive point.

Permanent power does not necessarily need to prevent political change. It can simply learn how to survive it.

It can adapt to different governments, different majorities, different ideologies.

It does not necessarily have to win elections.

It only has to still be there after the elections.

Indeed, in some cases the most effective form of power is precisely the kind that does not need to expose itself. The power that appears when needed, influences a decision, slows a process, suggests a solution, makes one option possible and another impractical.

This is the power of intermediation.

And the intermediary becomes powerful precisely because they stand between two actors who need one another but do not possess the same information.

The same principle can operate in public procurement, state-owned companies, consulting arrangements, appointments, regulatory bodies, technical agencies, and extraordinary structures created to deal with emergencies.

Emergencies, in particular, can become natural laboratories for the concentration of power. When ordinary procedures are deemed too slow, extraordinary instruments are introduced: commissioners, special task forces, accelerated procedures, and exceptional decision-making structures. In many cases, this is indispensable. But every exception simultaneously creates a new space for discretion.

The real danger, therefore, is not necessarily the emergency itself.

It is the transformation of the exception into a permanent condition.

The same applies to the digital transformation of the state. In the future, an increasing share of power will not lie solely with whoever signs an official decision, but with those who control the infrastructures through which that decision can actually be implemented. Databases, information systems, interoperability, algorithms, and artificial intelligence may become new sites of power concentration.

This will be a less visible form of power than traditional bureaucracy.

It may not necessarily decide what the state should do.

But it may help determine what the state is actually capable of doing.

And that could be even more important.

At this point, a perhaps counterintuitive conclusion emerges: the deep state, understood as the permanent power of entrenched structures, does not necessarily have to be imagined as a secret organization.

It could be an emergent phenomenon.

It could arise spontaneously from the accumulation of thousands of small vacancies filled over the course of many years.

A vacuum creates an intermediary. The intermediary becomes necessary. Necessity produces dependency. Dependency creates relationships. Relationships produce a network. The network accumulates memory. Memory produces continuity. Continuity produces autonomy.

And autonomy eventually produces power.

The sequence could be expressed simply:

vacuum → occupation → necessity → dependency → relationships → network → continuity → autonomy → power.

At that point, nobody necessarily needs to be in charge from above.

The system can begin to preserve itself.

Perhaps this is the most sophisticated form of power: not the power that orders others what to do, but the power that becomes indispensable for others to do anything at all.

That is why, if we want to understand where permanent power actually comes from, we should not limit ourselves to observing who formally occupies the institutions.

We should examine the spaces the institutions leave unattended.

Who fills them?

For how long?

With what expertise?

With what relationships?

With what information?

And above all: what would happen if that person, structure, or network suddenly disappeared?

If the answer is that a significant part of the system would no longer know how to function, then we may have identified something important.

We have found a center of power.

Not necessarily illegal. Not necessarily hidden. Not necessarily corrupt.

But potentially permanent.

Because the hardest power to remove is not the power that is imposed.

It is the power that, after filling a vacuum, manages to convince everyone that it is indispensable.