When the Brain Is No Longer in the Courtroom
The Roggero case and the neurobiology of fear — on what the law must decide, what science can explain, and the narrow space between them.
Editorial — April 2026
A note for readers outside Italy. On 28 April 2021, three armed robbers entered the jewellery shop of Mario Roggero in the small Piedmontese town of Grinzane Cavour. They threatened his wife and daughter, seized goods, and fled toward a waiting car. Roggero followed them out into the street with a revolver he had kept for years, and opened fire. Two of the robbers died. A third was wounded. In December 2025, after a first-instance sentence of seventeen years, the Court of Assizes of Appeal in Turin convicted Roggero of double murder and attempted murder, sentencing him to fourteen years and nine months. The court’s written reasons, released in February 2026, explicitly rejected the defence of legitimate self-defence. Roggero has since appealed to the Court of Cassation. The judgment is final only if the Cassation confirms it. The case has divided Italian public opinion for five years. It has also divided something else: the law and the neurobiology of acute stress. This editorial is about that second division.
I write not as a jurist and not as a party. I write as a physician, interested in what human beings actually do when they believe their lives are at stake — and in the honest limits of the neurobiological knowledge that might illuminate those moments without excusing them.
When the brain is no longer “in the courtroom” but “in the trench”
In Behave, Robert Sapolsky sets out with unusual clarity what happens inside the human nervous system under acute threat. Control of our actions shifts: from the deliberative machinery of the prefrontal cortex — the part that weighs consequences, proportionality, alternatives — to the amygdala and the limbic system, where impulsivity, survival and automatism dominate. This is not a metaphor. It is a measurable redistribution of neural flows, of hormones, of catecholamines, of attentional schema. When the nervous system believes it is in danger, the implicit question is no longer what is the right thing to do? It is how do I survive the next two seconds?
In the Roggero case, the psychophysical context is not that of a peaceful citizen suddenly flooded with adrenaline. It is that of a man with traumatic memory: in 2015 he had suffered a violent robbery with fractures to his nose and ribs, and between 2014 and 2015 he had endured repeated break-ins at his home. Expert reports in the trial documented post-traumatic stress disorder. As he stated in court: “My life and my family’s life have not been the same since.”
Traumatic memory can amplify the limbic response. What others perceive as “robbers in flight,” his brain may perceive as an active, persistent threat. The neurobiological point is that the perception of danger does not necessarily coincide with actual danger — but it is the perception that drives action when the prefrontal cortex has, in Sapolsky’s language, been switched off.
Law: the boundary drawn by the facts
The judicial reconstruction is unambiguous. The robbers had already left the shop. They were moving toward the getaway car. Roggero pursued them, armed, and opened fire. The sequence continued with further shots and, at its end, a physical struggle with one of the wounded men.
For this reason, the Court of Assizes of Appeal in Turin — in the written reasons deposited on 2 February 2026 — confirmed the conviction for voluntary homicide at fourteen years and nine months, expressly excluding the defence of legittima difesa — legitimate self-defence. The court’s formulation is careful and, I think, correct in principle: when the threat ceases, defence cannot transform itself into punishment.
Criminal law cannot be built on subjective perception alone. It rests on objective criteria — present danger, proportionality, cessation of the offence — or the line between defence and vengeance evaporates. The Italian 2019 reform of self-defence, invoked by Roggero’s lawyers, did not in substance alter that architecture; the appeal court said so explicitly. As the prosecuting magistrate Davide Greco put it: “It was not legitimate defence. It was illegitimate revenge.”
The court did recognise the mitigating factor of provocazione — provocation — and reduced the sentence from the seventeen years of the first instance. The judgment remains a criminal judgment, but the sentence is partly calibrated on the defendant’s psychological condition. This is not a capitulation. It is the ordinary work of a legal system that tries to distinguish what was donefrom the person who did it.
A minute under the microscope
The surveillance cameras documented the sequence. A plausible reconstruction, based on the images, runs as follows. At around 17:40, the robbers leave the back of the shop with Roggero. About thirty seconds later, the three flee through the side exit toward the car. Immediately afterwards, Roggero emerges with the revolver and fires five shots in rapid succession. In the final phase, he reaches Andrea Spinelli, already gravely wounded, and strikes him. The struggle lasts a few seconds before Spinelli collapses.
Total duration: approximately one minute from the beginning of the flight to the lethal outcome.
This timing is not available in the judgments with second-by-second precision; it is a reasonable interpretive reconstruction from visual sources, useful for understanding the neurobiological context rather than for settling the legal one. To it must be added a detail that matters: the internal cameras show Roggero’s wife attempting to place herself between him and the exit, and Roggero moving her aside to pursue the robbers. That gesture complicates any simple account of confused threat perception.
The problem of the “return window”
Sapolsky describes the prefrontal shutdown as rapid — a matter of seconds. The return is gradual. And this is where a genuine grey zone opens.
The very first instants can be dominated by the limbic circuit. As seconds pass, a growing share of cognitive control may reactivate. But — and this is decisive — there are no neurophysiological measurements that allow us to establish when, inside those sixty seconds, prefrontal governance resumed command of the action. The dissent among the court-appointed experts (three for partial impairment of mind, two against) is not an embarrassment for the science. It is the accurate reflection of what neurobiology can and cannot do in a forensic setting.
Neurobiology, therefore, does three things in this case. It does not justify the action. It does not reverse the legal qualification. But it helps us understand the vulnerability of a person acting under extreme fear, and it sets honest limits on how far science can travel into a specific legal moment.
Two worlds of intelligibility
The law asks: had the danger ceased?
Neurobiology answers: for his brain, perhaps not.
These are not incompatible answers. They are two levels of truth. And this is the crucial conceptual move of the case. The first shot and the final blow belong to different moments of the same sequence — and possibly to different cerebral states. If the beginning was “in the trench,” the end may already have been “in the courtroom.” This distinction does not absolve. It calibrates. It serves to tune moral responsibility and proportionality of punishment, which is what the mitigating factors in the Italian judgment are designed to do.
A possible synthesis
On the qualification of the act. The crime remains homicide, because the threat had ceased and because the sequence includes conduct that cannot plausibly be reduced to pure reflex.
On the response of the State. The sentence partly accounts for the neurobiology of trauma, while the dissent among experts marks the limits of translating the scientific datum into a legal one.
On the public message. Yes to defending oneself; no to summary executions.
On the understanding of the person. We can grasp that in the first instants he was acting like a hunted animal, while recognising that the sequence complicated itself as time advanced.
Justice and understanding are not enemies
The duty of the State is to draw boundaries: no one may make themselves judge or executioner. The duty of the community is to understand the human being who remains beneath the crime — not a planning killer, but a man gripped by an ancient fear.
The law establishes the limit. Science helps us understand how and why that limit is crossed. Time — sixty seconds — measures how instantaneous or prolonged the crossing was.
Punish, yes — but without pretending that understanding the fear is the same as forgiving the act.
Note on the status of the case at publication. On 20 March 2026, Roggero’s counsel filed an appeal with the Italian Court of Cassation, the country’s highest criminal court, contesting the appeal judgment. The conviction is therefore not yet final. This editorial addresses the principles and the scientific literature engaged by the case; it does not pre-empt the decision of the Cassation. The opinions expressed are the author’s own.
