Farewell to Elvio Fassone: from his letters to the condemned man to the right to hope

Dear Salvatore, dear President. For 26 years, the judge and ‘his’ convicted prisoner wrote to one another. And now that Elvio Fassone – aged 88, a magistrate, former member of the High Council of the Judiciary and a senator for two terms – is no longer with us, that correspondence remains his principal legacy. Along with the ‘crazy’ idea of a justice system that takes care to engage with the individual, after having examined the offence.

As President of the Court of Assizes in Turin in 1985, Elvio Fassone was called upon to deal with the numerous serious offences committed by Salvatore, a twenty-year-old mafia boss from Catania, who was on trial in a high-profile case. He eventually sentenced him to life imprisonment. But it was then – once the legal codes had been closed and the law applied – that another story began. With the first letter the judge sent, along with a book, to the prisoner. Thus began a dialogue that seemed impossible at first, one that lasted longer than any correspondence, even between lovers, as he himself put it. It became a book in 2015, *Fine Pena, ora* (End of Sentence, Now), published by Sellerio: a book that remains, even today, sixteen years after its publication, one of the most compelling accounts – not only, and not so much, of prison and its dire conditions; nor so much or solely about the lives of Salvatore and others like him, deprived of their freedom and hope before the Constitutional Court ruled on life imprisonment without the possibility of parole; but that correspondence remains to this day one of the most genuine questions about a justice system that does not consider itself satisfied merely with the – albeit necessary – sentence – however severe – but is concerned with understanding and recognising humanity. A justice system and a judge who do not feel threatened by such closeness, which goes beyond the laws and codes strictly applied, but is, in fact, strengthened by them.

‘Your Honour, if I’d been born where your son was born, he’d be the one in the cage now, and I’d be a lawyer – and perhaps a good one at that,’ Salvatore tells him brazenly. Yet his words strike a chord with the magistrate. In this five-chapter account, from dawn to night, the life-sentenced prisoner describes his day behind bars in minute detail to the judge. A single day, like a whole lifetime, as the same stagnant air repeats itself. Salvatore will tell the President about his journey – arduous, painful – and his latest setbacks. The loss of illusions. And at one point he will even attempt to take his own life, as so many prisoners do every year, especially at this time of year, during the weeks of scorching heat when all initiative wanes. Then, for this dramatic attempt, the former twenty-year-old – who has become a man behind bars – will apologise to his judge, who has become his ‘pen pal’. Through this extraordinary experience and his decision to share it publicly, Fassone has contributed like few others to the debate on the actual effectiveness of punishment and on the ‘right to hope’ erased by life imprisonment. Salvatore would say: ‘Never mind, I told you I’m cursed.’ But no. Even after stepping down from the bench, Fassone has continued to reflect on imprisonment, punishment and the central role of the passage of time, which – as the Constitutional Court wrote – ‘may bring about significant changes, both in the prisoner’s personality and in the context outside prison’ (Constitutional Court, judgment no. 253/2019).

A prospect of change completely wiped out by the ‘never’ at the end of the sentence. ‘That “never” – wrote Fassone – signifies the end of hope, and hope is necessary for living; it is co-essential to existence. One cannot truly live without planning some achievement and without setting oneself some goal that helps us in our search for meaning, and this is rendered impossible by the fact that time in prison cannot be filled with anything other than its own passing, whilst the time after release – to which one clings whilst waiting for the former to end – is nullified by that adverb’. To that adverb – ‘never’ – Fassone has, throughout his life, set against his own ‘End of sentence: now’. As is increasingly being echoed by magistrates, prison staff and lawyers who reach the same conclusion once they gain a deeper, first-hand understanding of prison life, its actual conditions and its injustices, beyond the lofty constitutional principles. ‘He has dedicated his entire life to justice, to responsibility, and to every possibility of dialogue,’ writes Sellerio, who, speaking of the book *Fine pena: ora*, recalls how it has ‘given voice to a story that continues to challenge us all: the gap between law, justice and conscience’.

I wonder what Salvatore – whom we’ve lost track of – would like to write in his latest letter to his judge today.