The Italian ergastolo or life sentence after the legislative reform of the aggravated (ostative) modality

Abstract

This paper will review the regulation of the Italian penalty of life imprisonment (ergastolo). In the first part will be studied the initial legal regime (from 1930) and the reforms which, from the approval of the Italian Constitution (1947) until the end of the 1980s, reduced the initial severity of the penalty. This will be followed by an analysis of its aggravated form (ergastolo ostativo), introduced at the beginning of the 1990s in response to the serious attacks that mafia-type criminality had been carrying out. Finally, we will examine the legislative changes implemented in 2022 in the regulation of this aggravated penalty, motivated by the Viola v. Italy judgment of the European Court of Human Rights (of 2019) and by several decisions of the Constitutional Court that have followed.