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.