Italy: Death at Regina Coeli
01 November 1999
Rome investigating magistrates have opened inquiries into the death of Marco Giuffreda in Rome's Regina Coeli jail on 2 November. Arrested on 28 October and charged with dealing heroin, he had been granted house arrest on the morning of Saturday 30 October, but the judicial order had not been executed, probably due to staff shortages for the All Souls' weekend. Giuffreda had no criminal record, and was a non-chronic hepatitis C sufferer (although police reportedly suggested that he was an Aids sufferer to the press). He began feeling ill on Saturday 30 October, was brought to the jail's infirmary on Monday, and was soon transferred to hospital, after spending two days in the overcrowded "first section" where the newly arrested and drug addicts are kept. Alessandra Beccaro, deputy director of Regina Coeli, describes it as "the nightmare [literally "hell"] of the first section, which is always in an emergency situation, where overcrowding is such that you can't control anything. You don't know what happens in those cells, if the detainees are beating each other up. Or whether a person is ill".
Giuffreda died in the Spallanzani hospital on Tuesday afternoon, after another hospital transfer, doctors saying he had a "bilateral bronchitis", and no one from the jail even informed his family of the death. Their lawyer was told of Marco's death when he called to ask why the judicial order for a house arrest had not been carried out.
Following this tragic incident, Giancarlo Caselli, head of the Dipartimento Amministrazione Penitenziaria (Dap, Department of Penitentiary Administration), sent out a letter to remind jail authorities that people who are granted house arrest have a right for the judicial order to be carried out "immediately". His message stresses that any time spent in jail after the order has been received is unlawful, and breaches "principles which are established at a constitutional level", regardless of whether the delay has bureaucratic causes. Il Manifesto reports that Alessandro Margara, the previous head of Dap, had written a similar letter on 3 June 1998, in which he criticised jail administrators for delays in the execution of house arrest orders, which must be immediate. After his departure, deputy head Paolo Mancuso was responsible for a new letter explaining that "the demand that those orders must be executed "immediately on reception" should be interpreted to mean that procedures should be immediately commenced and, when these are concluded, just as immediately the detainee must be transferred to house arrest". Thus, it relieved authorities of blame if the correct bureaucratic procedure had been initiated. In Giuffreda's case the procedure had been commenced, but his file was awaiting scrutiny for at least 36 hours which cost him his life.