In the landscape of international judicial cooperation, few matters are as sensitive as extradition to countries that provide for criminal sanctions incompatible with the fundamental principles of the Italian legal system. The case of Lee Gilley, on which the Court of Appeal of Turin ruled by way of an order dated 17 July 2026, offers a concrete and timely illustration of these tensions, with significant implications for anyone involved — directly or indirectly — in transatlantic extradition proceedings.
The Case: What Happened in Turin
Section II of the Court of Appeal of Turin, presided over by Dr Palmesino and with Dr Sterpos serving as reporting judge, issued an order formulating requests for clarification addressed to the Government of the United States, availing itself of the mechanism provided for under Article XI of the Extradition Treaty concluded between Italy and the USA. This mechanism allows the Italian judicial authority to temporarily suspend proceedings in order to obtain formal assurances from the requesting State on matters considered critical from a fundamental rights perspective.
The Court's concerns focus on two distinct yet equally significant profiles: the death penalty and life imprisonment without parole.
The Question of the Death Penalty: A Guarantee That Cannot Be Merely Partial
On the first point, the Turin Court referred to a landmark precedent in Italian constitutional case law: judgment No. 223 of 1996 of the Constitutional Court, which declared the constitutional illegitimacy of the law ratifying the Extradition Treaty with the USA insofar as it did not make surrender conditional upon a guarantee that the death penalty would neither be imposed nor carried out. The principle is unequivocal: Article 27, fourth paragraph, of the Italian Constitution establishes an absolute prohibition that admits no exceptions or ambiguity.
And it is precisely ambiguity that emerges as the central problem in the Gilley case. The case file — in particular, a communication sent by email — reveals that the Office of the District Attorney of Harris County did not definitively exclude the possibility of seeking the death penalty at a later stage in the proceedings. It had merely declared that it had not sought such penalty at that time, thereby leaving open the door to subsequent procedural developments. In the view of the Court of Appeal, this «non-linear» position is insufficient to satisfy the constitutionally mandated condition: clear, formal, and binding guarantees are required — not mere statements of intent that remain open to revision.
Life Imprisonment Without Hope: The European Court of Human Rights' Two-Stage Test
The second issue addressed in the order concerns the possibility that, in the event of conviction, the extradited individual may be subjected to
