Two weeks after the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Capaci massacre, the Cassation opens the release of Totò Riina. According to the judges of the High Court, the "right to die with dignity" must be guaranteed to every prisoner, even one with the criminal "thickness" of the former head of Cosa Nostra.
The first criminal section of the Cassation for the first time accepted the appeal of Totò Riina's defender, who requested the postponement of the sentence or, alternatively, home detention after the No arrived last year from the surveillance court of Bologna. The latter, according to the judges, in motivating the refusal had failed "to consider the overall morbid state of the prisoner and his general conditions of physical deterioration". The court had not held that there was incompatibility between Riina's illness and detention in prison, Piazza Cavour instead believes that the judge must verify and justify "whether the state of prison detention involves suffering and affliction of such intensity" as go beyond the "legitimate execution of a sentence".
Not only that, according to the panel, the judge's decision does not reveal how it came to be considered compatible with the sense of humanity of the sentence "the maintenance in prison, instead of home detention, of an over eighty-year-old subject suffering from double renal neoplasia, with a highly compromised neurological situation", who is unable to sit still and is exposed "due to severe heart disease to unfortunate and unpredictable cardiovascular events".
The Cassation therefore overturns the court's decision, "having on the contrary to affirm the existence of a right to die with dignity" which must be ensured to the prisoner.
