[Illustration: "FOUND AN ITALIAN ... LYING ACROSS HARRINGTON'S BODY" (p. 169).]
The case was tried before Mr. Baron Martin, and although the evidence was extremely conflicting, the learned judge said that he thought it quite conclusive against the prisoner. He summed up strongly for a conviction, and the jury brought in a verdict of guilty, whereon Pellizioni was sentenced to be hanged. This result was not accepted as satisfactory by many thoughtful people, and the matter was taken up by the Press, notably by the _Daily Telegraph_. Some of the condemned convict's compatriots became deeply interested in him. It was known that in the locality of Saffron Hill he bore the repute of a singularly quiet and inoffensive man. Ultimately, a priest, who laboured among these poor Italians, saved Justice from official murder by bringing one of his flock to confess that he and not Pellizioni had struck the fatal blows. This was one Gregorio Mogni, but he protested that he had acted only in self-defence.
Mogni was forthwith arrested, tried, and convicted of the crime, with the strange result that now two men lay in Newgate, both condemned, independently not jointly, of one and the same crime. If Mogni had struck the blows, clearly Pellizioni could not have done so. Moreover, a new fact was elicited at Mogni's trial, and this was the production--for the first time--of the weapon used. It was a knife, and this knife had been found some distance from the scene of the crime, where it could not have been thrown by Pellizioni. And again, it was known and sworn to as Mogni's knife, which, after stabbing the men, he had handed to a friend to take away.
The gravamen of the charge against the police was that they had found the knife before Pellizioni was tried. It was at once recognised all through Saffron Hill that it was Mogni's knife, and with so much current gossip it was hardly credible that the police were not also informed of this fact. Yet, fearing to damage their case (a surely permissible inference), they kept back the knife at the first trial. It was afterwards said to have been in court, but it certainly was not produced, while it is equally certain that its identification would have quite altered the issue, and that Pellizioni would not have been condemned. The defence, in his case, went the length of declaring that to this questionable proceeding the police added false swearing. No doubt they stuck manfully to their chief and to each other, but they hardly displayed the open and impartial mind that should characterise all officers of justice. In any case, it was not their fault that an innocent man was not hanged.