At the beginning of Delitto e perdono Adriano Prosperi recalls the killing of Osama Bin Laden, regarded as an act of justice by the American people and its president. Then, his book goes on spurring useful remarks about the history of the idea of conviction to death as a repair. One of the main threads of western thought about capital punishment can be found in contrasting vengeance and mercy from XI century, when Christ’s sacrifice became the ideal link for most criminal codes. In fact, every executed man could hope for God’s forgiveness and for his own soul’s salvation at the foot of the Cross. Face to the advices of Confortatori, which until XIX century escorted all men sentenced to death to the scaffold, almost none refused to agree to religious solace, and so the execution proceeding became a sacramental act.