Often the granting of pardon by the President of the Republic to convicted people gives rise to political controversy because there are different ideas in public opinion: some are in favour, others against. Disputes have arisen on many occasions and in many countries. In the United States, for example, various clemency measures issued by Joe Biden and Donald Trump have sparked debates. In Italy, among the most controversial cases were those of Graziano Mesina, Sabrina De Sousa and three men convicted of the Calabresi murder: Adriano Sofri, Giorgio Pietrostefani (never pardoned) and Ovidio Bompressi (who received a pardon in 2006).
What does a presidential pardon mean
The institution of grace is provided for in the legislation of numerous countries. Generally, the power to grant it lies with the head of state: the president in republican countries, the king in monarchies. The pardon can be total or partial, that is, it can completely cancel the sentence or only reduce it. Pardon is not a form of absolution: on the contrary, it recognizes the guilt of the condemned person, but forgives him for humanitarian or other reasons.
Pardon measures often give rise to political controversies, because public opinion and the ruling class are divided between those in favor and those against. Presidents have sometimes been accused of granting pardons to benefit their political supporters and, in some cases, their own family. A recent case involved the former president of the United States, Joe Biden, who in 2024, a few months before the end of his mandate, granted a presidential pardon to his son, Hunter Biden, convicted of illegal possession of weapons and tax crimes.
The current president of the United States, Donald Trump, has also received strong criticism for the pardons issued in favor of friends and supporters, including people convicted of crimes related to the financing of his election campaigns.
Grace, amnesty and pardon in Italy
Grace, amnesty and pardon are three distinct forms of legal clemency provided by our Republic. Grace, as already said, does not erase the guilt but the punishment in the case of a single individual; the pardon does the same thing but with a collective crime, while the amnesty extinguishes the crime upstream. Shortly after the establishment of the republic, for example, a specific amnesty (i.e. a sort of collective pardon) which went down in history as the Togliatti amnesty, guaranteed impunity to most of the exponents of the fascist regime.
Among the individual measures, some have been contested. Recently, for example, a heated controversy erupted over the case of Usama Al Masri, a Libyan criminal subject to an international arrest warrant and arrested in Italy on 19 January 2025, who was released from prison for procedural reasons and repatriated on a state flight, despite very serious accusations of war crimes and torture. However, it was not a real pardon because Al Masri had not been convicted. There are several cases of Graziano Mesina, Sabrina De Sousa and the men accused of the murder of Commissioner Calabresi.
The case of Graziano Mesina
Among the most controversial pardon measures in the history of Italy is certainly that in favor of Graziano Mesina, mentioned above Gratzianeddu, for which the provision was issued in 2004 by president Carlo Azeglio Ciampi. Mesina, born in Orgosolo (province of Nuoro) in 1942, was one of the most notorious Sardinian bandits, author of kidnappings, murders and other crimes. He has spent his life in and out of prison since his adolescence, spending around forty years in total behind bars and being the protagonist of daring escapes.
In 2003, now elderly, he instructed his lawyers to ask President Ciampi for a pardon, who agreed to grant it the following year. The measure aroused much controversy, given the seriousness of the crimes of which Mesina was guilty. What’s worse, after his release the bandit took advantage of his freedom to start crime again: he worked for a period as a tourist guide in his hometown Orgosolo, but in 2013 with a gang of associates he planned a new kidnapping and was arrested for this. Released from prison due to the expiration of the terms of custody in 2019, the following year, when the carabinieri went to his home to take him back to prison, he could not be found and became a fugitive again, at the venerable age of 78. Captured the following year, he died in 2025.
The concession to Sabrina De Sousa, former CIA agent
Sabrina De Sousa is a former CIA agent of Portuguese origins, involved in the kidnapping of Abu Omar, an Egyptian imam resident in Milan. Abu Omar was kidnapped in 2003 by US agents, with the complicity of Italian agents, for suspected terrorist activities. Deported to Egypt, he was subjected to torture and held in prison without trial. In 2009 De Sousa, who in the meantime had moved to Portugal, was sentenced to 7 years in prison, later reduced to 4, for the kidnapping. Other American agents and two Italian agents were convicted together with her.
De Sousa, however, was arrested and extradited to Italy only on 20 February 2017. Eight days later President Mattarella granted her a one-year pardon of her sentence so that, with less than three years left to serve, she could access alternative sentences to prison. The extradition order was revoked and De Sousa was able to return to Portugal. The measure sparked heated controversy in Italy, also because rumors immediately spread that it had been issued under pressure from the United States (whose presidency Donald Trump had just taken office for his first term). The circumstance has not been proven, but it is certain that De Sousa never served the sentence to which she was sentenced.
Sofri, Bompressi and Pietrostefani
Adriano Sofri, Giorgio Pietrostefani and Ovidio Bompressi were the protagonists of a long legal affair. In 1997 they were found guilty of the murder of Commissioner Luigi Calabresi, which occurred in 1972, at the height of the Years of Lead, and sentenced to 22 years in prison. According to the accusations, Sofri and Pietrostefani were the instigators of the murder, Bompressi the killer; the condemned have always professed their innocence. After the end of the trial, a large area of intellectuals and civil society movements proposed pardoning the three men, due to the fact that the conviction was based on rather questionable evidence.
However, only one of the three was pardoned. Pietrostefani fled to France, protected by the Mitterrand Doctrine (the principle that limits the possibility of extraditing those accused of political crimes). Sofri has always refused to ask for pardon, despite the vast campaign in his favor, believing that his innocence should be recognized, and no president has adopted the act of clemency spontaneously, because some of the political forces were against it. Sofri then served his sentence partly in prison and partly under house arrest. Only Bompressi asked for and obtained a pardon in 2006.
