A LENIENT GOVERNMENT.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume IV, Issue 192, 1 December 1876, Page 8

A LENIENT GOVERNMENT.

■•-+ In a late number of the ' Catholic Review ' we called attention to the transfer of the cowardly instigator of murder, Luciani, to a more comfortable prison and one where the chances of escape were numerous. Of course his pardon will soon follow. Italy is beginning to ask what punishment there is for murderers when they chance to belong to secret societies. The recent pardon of De Mata, who, in 1861, brutally murdered Mele, a commissioner of police in Naples, has made the entire people cry out in indignation against an administration that so openly proclaims its sympathies with murderers and criminals of every kind. The murder of Mele caused, at the time of its occurrence, considerable excitement. A young advocate of good family, he had entered the police of Naples with a firm determination to reform its administration and relieve his native city of the disgrace attaching to it from the impunity with which crime was committed in its streets. It was the time when the Camorra, having hatched out their plot, were about to put it into execution. Under the guise of legitimists and with the avowed object of restoring Francis 11. to the throne from which the Republicans had torn him, only to see it occupied by another monarchial dynasty, several Republican leaders had organised a powerful society into which they vainly sought to initiate the faithful Neapolitans, it was their intention to rise in arms, overpower the Piedmontese garrisons, go through the farce of proclaiming Francis 11. king, which they fondly hoped would cause the peasantry to flock to their standard. With power once in their hands they could do 'as they pleased, and what they pleased would be to proclaim the Republic. Mele had not been long in office when he was approached by emissaries of the Camorra to induce him to join them, but he not only steadily refused, "but set himself energetically to work to break up the conspiracy. He proaured evidence of the complicity in the plot of the most prominent leaders and took measures to arrest them. This sealed his doom. He was judged by the secret tribunal of the Camorra and sentenced to death, De Mata volunteering to execute the sentence. The next evening, with his foot on the doorstep, advancing to meet his young wife, who, with her boy by her side and a bab\ in her arms stood in the door to welcome him, he was set upon by I>e Mata who pierced him through twelve times with a poignard. The murderer was arrested, and after a. sham trial "was sentenced to the galleys for life. Now, in lS^, fifteen years later, his sentence is commuted to twenty years imprisonment. The boy who then witnessed the murder of his father is a rising young officer of artillery. The wife who thus witnessed her husband's butchery has since been a helpless invalid. On hearing of the intention of the government to comnutte the sentence of De Mata, the latter petitioned the King that he be forbidden permission to re-visit Naples, and this gentleman King so far recolleoted his duty as a human being as to grant her request.