More like:
- to attack someone you need a levelled character (no throwaway)
- if you kill someone, it can be traced back to you
- put some negative perk on you, possibly one that you cant get rid of (eg being capable of being murdered in your sleep by the family of whoever you killed)
those are just a few ideas, not necessarily what will be in game. but that goes for anything in this thread, really, we are developing iteratively.
Please don't add this bullshit. There shouldn't be any limitations like that. You may add some kind of reputation which would more like an aesthetic parameter used for roleplaying or other purposes (i.e. you can't achieve a status of a knight having negative reputation or become a bandit with positive whatsoever). Giving away random deaths like "you were killed while you were sleeping, kthxbye" would cause GTXs. The more reasons to quit - the faster community disappears (you should have learned it well with crpg).
The whole "no grind" idea is also a misleading point. According to your description the game lacks addiction points and abounds with reasons to quit the game. It doesn't make it more hardcore - it makes it more random and stupid. I'm all for e-sport elements in this game: competitive fights, less random factors, strategy and tactics elements. If you don't make a proper fighting system - nobody would play a broken SimCity simulator.
One idea in my mind is also that, to kill someone, you need to watch him for some time. So there will be a way to disguise your identity and then kill him. The one who is killed (his family or faction) doesn't know who it was. He does however know that it was one who was within his vicinity. It must be someone he interacted with. Murder weapons will not be disposable, but must be hidden for some time. When the murder weapon is found, or the killer, it will be possible to backtrace where his weapons or money came from, so you cant just make a pure throwaway killer account.
Those are just ideas to give you an idea about the permadeath feature. Murders will be rare, special events, and something that will always be investigated.
On the other hand though, a murder will hurt. A lot. It will be very disruptive, possibly destroying your economy or political agenda. I have a few ideas how to do that, but will also take a lot of testing.
You won't "live" only with the people you like. You live in cities, very public to some extent, and you will not like everyone within that city. There are people coming and going, traders, new immigrates, and lots of social tension.
As I said, that feature will take a lot of finetuning to get right. But I think when we get it right, it will be an interesting concept of the game, because some murders will be executed in a way where the murderer can't be found, and will cause distrust in communities. Possibly wars between families. Drama. Stories 
For now it just looks like a fantasy without any backthoughts about how to make it work. It has nothing to do with real game experience. You speak about drama, politics and so on. And how it will be in reality:
a 12y.o. kid who lives nearby did something bad to my character (stole food i.e.), called me a noob and my mom a fat bitch. I want that bugger to get killed - so there is no way I can fight him without killing the game experience for my character forever?
My main suggestion: stop this fantasy bullcrap and make a classy game with perfect fighting system. You can add other stuff on top of it. Other than that - the game is going to become a usual crap that is always "work in progress" or "early alpha access" with shitloads of bugs and broken features that makes it hard to achieve a good gaming experience.
