La pena naturale de lege lata

After a general overview of the issues surrounding the so-called natural penalty, the essay offers an analytical and structural definition of it, based on three elements, among which the absence of the punitive purpose appears to be the decisive one for the distinction from the so-called forensic penalty. The work, then, tends to demonstrate that in our legal system it is already possible to trace an institution, that of preventive detention, which implicitly can be traced back to the model of informal or natural punishment. Assuming that, in the event of a subsequent irrevocable conviction, the deduction of pre-trial detention is a constitutionally indispensable criterion, the Author draws arguments in support of the need to also deduct other suffering of natural origin from the forensic sentence, also suggesting possible criteria for measuring its equivalence. Finally, the essay, after a comparative investigation and through the derogation or disapplication of the edictal minima, proposes some de lege lata solutions to make the natural penalty ‘justiciable’.