Il diritto alla speranza: l’ergastolo nel diritto penale costituzionale

If the purpose of punishment is the resocialization of the offender, imprisonment cannot be endless: this is why, since always, life imprisonment is and remains a legal issue to be debated and resolved. This volume intends to do so, in the shared perspective of its definitive overcoming.Section I of Part One hosts the most relevant contributions that, over time, the authors have dedicated to the topic, thus providing an overall picture of the regulatory events of life imprisonment, considered in all its typologies. Section II of Part One reproduces two amici curiae, presented in Strasbourg in the case Viola v. Italy n. 2, in which the European Court of Human Rights ruled – for the first time – on life imprisonment without parole. And it declared it to be in violation of art. 3 of the Convention, therefore, of human dignity, which, according to the precise words of the Court, located at the center of the system created by the Convention, prevents depriving a person of his liberty, without at the same time working for his reintegration.The entire Second Part, instead, offers a collection of the most relevant sentences regarding the legal regime of life imprisonment, pronounced by the Court of Cassation, the Constitutional Court and the European Court of Human Rights (among which the very recent Viola v. Italy n. 2, here translated into Italian). Seen as a whole, it is a jurisprudence that, from 1956 to today, has struck hard blows to the perpetuity of life imprisonment, without however hitting it definitively. Also for this reason, Section II of the Second Part hosts three acts of promotion to the Consulta with which the question of constitutionality of the variant of life imprisonment that more than the others denies hope, the ergastolo ostativo, has been posed, and is now re-proposed. The right to hope is nothing other than the acknowledgement that, behind any perpetuity and any automatism, there exists a person, who – according to the Constitution – is never lost forever.