tion of the crime, there being no proof that he had taken any
active part in the murder of Ugolini," therefore, "in the most holy name
of God," the court sentences Volpi to public execution, and Starna to
twenty years at the galleys.

Of course, both the prisoners resorted to their invariable right of
appeal, but their case did not come on before the lower court of the
Supreme Clerical Tribunal at Rome for upwards of a year, namely, on the
17th of May, 1859. At this trial, no new facts whatever appear to have
been adduced. I gather indistinctly, that Volpi's defence was that he
had not left his father's house at all on the morning of the murder, but
that his attempt to prove an "alibi" was unsuccessful. The chief object
indeed of the very lengthy sentence of the court, recapitulating the
evidence already stated, is to establish the comparative innocence of
Starna, who, for some cause or other, seems to have been favourably
regarded. We are told, that "the confession of Starna is confirmed by a
thousand proofs;" that "it is clearly shown" that Starna "in this
confession did not deny his own responsibility; a fact which gives his
statement the character of an incriminative and not of an exonerative
confession; and that though he might possibly have wished, in his
statement of the facts, to modify and extenuate his own share in the
crime, yet there was no reason to suspect that he wished gratuitously to
aggravate the guilt of his comrade;" and that also taking into
consideration the villainous character of Volpi, it cannot be doubted,
that he was the principal in the crime. The court at Viterbo had decided
that the crime of the prisoners was murder, coupled with robbery and
treachery. The Court of Appeal decides, on what seem sufficient grounds,
that there is no proof of treachery, and therefore, the crime not being
of so heinous a character, reduces the period of Starna's punishment from
twenty to fifteen years, while it simply confirms the sentence of death
on Volpi.

Again, as a matter of course, there is an appeal from this sentence to
the upper court of the Supreme Tribunal, which appeal comes off after
four months' delay, on the 9th of September, 1859. The only ground of
appeal brought forward is one which, according to our notions of law,
should have been brought forward from the first, namely, that the guilt
of Volpi is not adequately proved by the unsupported statement of his
accomplice Starna, and "that t