Chapter 6

Some three years ago, then, there lived in the hamlet of Cannara, near Perugia, a family called Bonci. They belonged to the peasant class, and were poor, even among the Papal peasantry. The family consisted of the father and mother, and of their son and daughter, both grown up. Between the father and son there had long been ill-blood. The cause of this want of family harmony is but indistinctly stated, but apparently it was due to the irregular habits of the son, and to the severity of the father; while all this domestic misery was rendered doubly bitter by the almost abject want of the household. On the night of November the 9th, 1856, Venanzio Bonci, the father, Maria Rosa, his wife, and their daughter, Caterina, were at supper in the miserable room, which formed the whole of their dwelling, waiting for the return of the son, Luigi, who had been absent ever since the morning. There had been frequent quarrels before between father and son about Luigi's stopping out late, and now it was past midnight. There was no light in the room except a faint flicker from the embers, and the feeble glimmering of the starlight which entered through the open windows. A noise was heard in the stable underneath the room, and the father, thinking it was the son, called out three or four times, but got no answer. A few minutes after Luigi entered without the lantern, which he had left below in the stable, and although his sister bade him good night he made no reply. As he entered the room his father called to him, "A fine time of night to come home." "What then?" was the only answer given by Luigi. "You have never been home since morning," went on the father. "What then?" was still the only answer. The father then told the son to hold his tongue, and again received the same reply. At last Venanzio, losing his temper, called out, "Be quiet, or I'll break your head;" or, according to the story, "I'll murder you:" to which Luigi only answered, "I may as well die to-day as to-morrow." After that there was a short scuffle heard, and Venanzio suddenly cried out as if in pain, "My God! my God!" The mother and daughter screamed for help, but by the time the neighbours had come in with lights, Luigi had run off. Venanzio was found reeling to and fro, with blood pouring from several wounds, and, in spite of medical aid, he died in the course of a few hours. Almost immediately after the commission of the crime Luigi was found by the gendarmes in the cottage of an uncle, and arrested on the spot.

These, as far as I can learn from the very confused documents before me, are all the facts admitted without question; or, more strictly speaking, which the Government states to have been unquestioned. Luigi was arrested on the night of the murder. Such small evidence as there was could have been ascertained in twenty-four hours, and yet the prisoner was never brought to trial till the 3rd of May, 1858; that is, eighteen months afterwards. On that day Luigi Bonci was arraigned before the civil and criminal court of Perugia, on the two counts of parricide, and of having illegal arms in his possession. The Court was composed of the President, Judge, Assistant Judge, and Deputy Judge of the district. These gentlemen (all, I should state, lay officials) were assisted by the public prosecutor and the Government counsel for the defence. The course of proceedings is stated to have been as follows: prayers were first offered up for the Divine guidance, the prisoner was introduced and identified, the written depositions were read over, a narrative of the facts was given by the president, the prisoner was called upon to reply to the charges alleged against him, the witnesses for the crown and for the prisoner were heard respectively, the counsel for the prosecution called upon the court to condemn the prisoner, and was replied to by the counsel for the defence; the discussion was then declared closed, and after the judges had retired and deliberated, their sentence was given.

All the facts I have been able to put together about the case are gathered from this sentence and from those of the courts of appeal. These sentences, however, are extremely lengthy, very indistinct, and encumbered with a great deal of legal phraseology. As they are all alike I may as well give an abstract of this one as a specimen of all. The sentence begins with the following moral remarks: "Frequent paternal admonitions, alleged scarcity of daily food, and the evil counsels of others, had alienated the heart of the prisoner to such an extent, that feelings of affection and reverence towards his own father, Venanzio, had given place to contempt, disobedience, ill-will, and even worse." No one, however, would have supposed that he "was capable of becoming a parricide, as was too clearly proved on the fatal night in question." After these preliminary reflections comes a narration of the facts much in the words in which I have given them. This is followed by a statement of the arguments for the prosecution and for the defence, consisting of a number of verbose paragraphs, each beginning, "considering that," &c. The case of the prosecution was clear enough. The medical evidence proved that the father died of the wounds received on the above-named night. The fact that the wounds were inflicted by the prisoner, was established by the evidence of his mother and sister, who overheard the quarrel between him and his father, by the flight after commission of the crime, by the discovery of a blood-stained knife dropped on the threshold, by the deposition of the father before death, and lastly, by the confession of the prisoner himself, who admitted the crime, though under extenuating circumstances. The fact that the sister never heard the knife open, although it had three clasps, was asserted to be evidence that the prisoner entered the room with his knife open and intending to commit the crime. This charge of _malice prepense_ was supported by the son's refusal to answer his father, by the insolence of his language, and by the number and vehemence of the stabs he inflicted.

The prisoner's defence was also very simple. According to his own story, he was half drunk on his return home. His father not only taunted and threatened him, but at last seized the door-bar and began knocking him about the head; and then, at last, maddened with pain and passion, he drew out a knife he had picked up on the road, and stabbed his father, hardly knowing what he did. On the bare statement of facts, I should deem this version of the story the more probable of the two, but as no details whatever are given of the evidence on either side, it is impossible to judge. The court at any rate decided that there was no proof of the prisoner having been drunk, and that the evidence of his father having struck him was of a suspicious character, "while," they add, "it would be absurd and immoral to maintain, that a father, whose right and duty it is to correct his children (and indeed on this occasion correction was abundantly deserved by the insolent demeanour of Luigi) could be considered to provoke his son by a slight personal chastisement." The son, by the way, was over one and twenty, a fact to which no allusion is made. As "a forlorn hope," in the words of the sentence, the counsel for the defence asserted, that whatever the crime of the prisoner might be, it was not parricide, from the simple fact that Luigi was not Venanzio's son. The facts of the case appear to have been, that Maria Rosa Battistoni being then unmarried, gave birth in July 1835 to a son, who was the prisoner at the bar; that shortly afterwards the vicar of Cannara gave information to the Episcopal court of Assisi, that Maria Rosa had been seduced by Venanzio Bonci and had had an illegitimate child by him; that, in consequence, a formal requisition was addressed by the above court to Venanzio, and that he thereupon acknowledged the paternity of the child, and expressed his readiness to marry the mother. The marriage was therefore solemnized, and the child entered in the church-books as the legitimized son of Venanzio and Maria Bonci, in June, 1836. Against this strong presumptive evidence of paternity, and the natural inference to be drawn from the child having been brought up and educated as Venanzio's son, there were only, we are told, to be set, alleged expressions of doubt on the father's part, when in a passion, as to his being really the father, and also certain confessions of the mother to different parties, that Luigi was not the child of her husband. All these confessions however, so it is asserted, were proved to be subsequent in date to the son's arrest, and therefore, probably, made with a view to save his life. The plea is in consequence rejected.

No defence was attempted to the second count. Both charges are therefore declared fully proved; and as the punishment for parricide is public execution, and the penalty for having in one's possession (a lighter offence by the way, than using) any weapon without special license, consists of imprisonment from two to twelve months, and of a fine from five to sixty scudi, therefore the court "condemns Luigi Bonci for the first count, to be publicly executed in Cannara, and to make compensation to the heirs of the murdered man, according to the valuation of the civil tribunals, and to pay the cost of the trial; and on the second count, the court" (with a pedantic mockery of mercy) "considers the first three months of the incarceration the prisoner has already undergone to be sufficient punishment, coupled with a fine of five scudi and the loss of the weapon."

This summary will, I fear, give the reader too favourable an opinion of the original sentence. In order to make the story at all intelligible, I have had to pick out my facts, from a perfect labyrinth of sentences and parentheses. All I, or any one else can state is, that these seem to be the facts, which seem to have been proved by the witnesses. What the character of the evidence was, or what was the relative credibility of the witnesses, whose very names I know not, or how far their assertions were borne out or contradicted by circumstantial proof, are all matters on which (though the whole character of the crime depends on them) I can form no opinion whatever.

The trial occupied but one day, and yet the above sentence, it appears, was not communicated to the prisoner till the 15th of October, 1858, that is, over five months afterwards. When the official announcement of the sentence was made, the prisoner declared his intention of appealing against its justice. By the Papal law, every person condemned for a criminal offence, by the lay tribunals, has the right of appealing to the Supreme Pontifical Court. It is, therefore, needless to say, that in all cases where sentence of death is passed, an appeal is made on any ground, however trivial, as the condemned culprit cannot lose by this step, and may gain. The practical and obvious objection to this unqualified power of appeal, is that the supreme ecclesiastical court is the real judge, not the nominal lay court, which does little more than register the fact, that the crime is proved _prima facie_.

On the 15th of February, 1859, after a delay of four months more from the time of appeal, the court of the supreme tribunal of the Consulta Sacra, assembled at the Monte Citorio in Rome, to try the appeal. The court was composed of six "most illustrious and reverend Judges," all "Monsignori" and all dignitaries of the Church, assisted by a public prosecutor and counsel for the defence, attached to the Papal exchequer. The course of proceedings appears to be much the same as in the inferior courts, except that no witnesses, save the prisoner, were examined orally, and the whole evidence was taken from written depositions. At last, after "invoking the most sacred name of God," the court pronounce their sentence. This sentence is in a great measure a recapitulation of the preceding one. Either no new facts were adduced, or none are alluded to. The grounds for the defence are the same as on the previous occasion, namely, the provocation given by the father, and the doubt as to the son's paternity. There were, in fact, two questions before the court. First, whether the crime committed was murder or manslaughter; and, if it was murder, whether the murderer was or was not the son of the murdered man. Instead, however, of facing either of these questions of fact, the court seems to enter upon abstract considerations, which to our notions are quite irrelevant. The degree to which paternal corrections can be carried without abuse, and the problem whether a man who kills a person, whom he believes and has reason to believe to be his father, but who is not so in fact, is guilty or not of the sin of parricide, seem rather questions for clerical casuistry than considerations which bear upon facts. The final conclusion drawn from these various reflections is, that the court confirms the judgment of the Perugian tribunal, in every respect.

The rejection of the appeal is not communicated for two months more, that is, not till the 22nd of April, to the prisoner, who at once appeals again against the execution of the verdict to the Upper Court of the Supreme Tribunal. On the 13th of May the case comes on for its third and last trial. The court is again composed of six ecclesiastics of high rank, assisted by the same official counsel as before; the same course of proceeding is adopted, except that the prisoner is not brought into court or examined. Again, after "invoking the most holy name of God," the tribunal pronounces, not its sentence this time, but its judgment. This judgment alludes only to the two grounds on which the appeal is based. The first is the question of paternity, which is at once dismissed, as being a matter of evidence that has been already decided. The second ground of appeal is a technical and a legal one. The defence appears to have pleaded, that the original arrest was illegal, and that, by this fact, the whole trial was vitiated. On both sides it was admitted that the prisoner was arrested without a warrant, and not in "flagrante delicto," and that therefore the arrest was, strictly speaking, illegal. The court, however, decides, that though the prisoner was not taken in the act, yet his guilt was so manifest, that the gendarmes were justified in acting as if they had caught him perpetrating the crime, while in offences of great atrocity the police have also a discretionary power to arrest offenders, even without warrants. Though in this particular instance the result is not much to be regretted, yet it is obvious, that the admission of such a principle, and such an interpretation of the law, gives the police unlimited power of arrest, subject to the approval of their superiors: whether right or wrong, therefore, the appeal is dismissed, and the final sentence of death pronounced.

It seems that this verdict was submitted on the 24th of May by the President of the Supreme Court to the consideration of his Holiness the Pope, who offered no objection to its execution. The prisoner's last chance was now gone, but, with a cruel mercy, he was left to linger on for eight months more in uncertainty. It was only on the 3rd of January, 1860, that orders were sent from Rome to Perugia, for the execution to take place there instead of at Cannara, on the 13th. On that day the verdict of the court is conveyed to the unhappy wretch. On the 14th, so the last paragraph informs us, "The condemned" Luigi Bonci "was beheaded by the public executioner, in the market-place of Perugia, and his head was there exposed for an hour to the gaze of the assembled multitude."

On the 18th the report, from which these facts are taken, was placarded on the walls of Rome. The murder is committed in November, 1856; the murderer is arrested on the night of the crime; for that crime he is not tried at all till May, 1858; his final trial does not come off till May, 1859, and his execution is deferred till January, 1860. For three years and a quarter after the commission of the murder no report is published. These facts need no comment.