PRISON DREAM

Northern Advocate, 4 January 1927, Page 8

PRISON DREAM

INNOCENT CONVICT’S VISION. For 46 years Alessandro Saraceni has languished in prison—a murderer according to the law, sentenced to perpetual imprisonment. But now Saraceni is a free man, and one to whom the law owes a debt it can never pay. For Saraceni’s 46 years in prison have been the martyrdom of an innocent man. In vain he had pleaded his innocence of the murder of the man who was found dead on the road near Naples in 1880, soon after he had passed by on his mule. The victim bore only one death mark, and that corresponded with the hoofprints of the mule. But a jury of "his fellow-citizens held that Saraceni had murdered the man, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment with a proviso that there should be no abatement of the “life” term.

Saraceni remained in goal, however, passed from the prime of young manhood to middle-age, knowing all the time that he was innocent, but impotent to upset the law’s decree. Forty-six years of deadly, dreary prison routine, and in that long period there was only one incident of note. But it is to that one incident —a dream — that Saraceni owes his freedom. Some 14 years ago, in his cell, Saraceni had a dream of extraordinary vividness. He saw King Victor of Italy on the point of being assassinated. Cries he uttered in his sleep brought a warder rushing to the cell. The prisoner, awakened, excitedly explained his dream or vision, with minute details. Struclf by the clarity of the story the warder reported the matter to the governor of the prison, who, probably as much as a joke as anything else, sent information to the Italian Chief of Police. To the police chief the thing did not seem a joke at all, for the story fitted in with the fact that on the morrow King Victor was to ride through the City of Rome with the Queen Elena. As the King and Queen rode, an an: rchist, D’Alba by name, fired three shots at them. Thanks to the astonishing story of the man in prison, such precautions had been taken by. police chief that the Sovereign and his consort escaped injury. Only recently did the story of his dream come to: the ,ears of the'King whose life it had saved. King Victor ordered a rehearing of his case. This time Saraceni was cleared, and the mule (long deceased) was found guilty of the murder.