This paper explores the roles institutional and discursive practices play in allowing femicide (i.e., the gender-related killing of women) in contexts where state sexism and authoritarianism converge. Focusing on the case of Turkey, I demonstrate that the practices that let women die include, but are not limited to, inefficient prosecution, delays in issuing orders of protection, and the lack of infrastructure to empower survivors. These institutional practices commonly force women to return to abusive partners who later become their killers. Moreover, the governing elites frequently make statements that promote conservative and gender-normative standards of feminine propriety, which justify violence against women who do not conform to the idealized notion of “proper woman.” Perpetrators employ the same discourses in their victim blaming defenses, which result in significant penalty reductions. This institutional and discursive context renders femicide a “tolerable crime” and leads perpetrators to think that it is their “right to kill” women (Milliyet 2015). I synthesize this data with the theories of biopolitics in explaining the phenomena that allow femicide without significant legal or social repercussions. I argue that the latter is enabled by a specific exercise of state power, which I term letting kill—a manifestation of biopolitical sovereignty that simultaneously claims to protect lives and allows their destruction (Agamben 1998). Letting kill refers to the processes through which the sovereign lets individuals assume the “right to kill,” without directly investing them with that power. It operates through three major mechanisms: policymaking and implementation, state representatives’ discursive practices that justify gender hierarchy, and lenient court decisions. As such, it implicates a strong yet complex relationship between those who do the letting (the state actors) and those who kill (ordinary citizens).