Execution for Contract Murder in Meran

Meran, October 16. Yesterday, three men from the surrounding area, two farmhands and a wealthy peasant, were executed here by hanging for committing a contract murder. The victim was the farmer's wife and mother of seven underage children. Good-natured and somewhat feeble-minded as she was, she had for years endured the severest abuse from her household, believed even after the most threatening mistreatment to which she was lately subjected that she had to heed the counsel of her spiritual guide, and remained in the home of her tormentors until she met her long-prepared death at the hands of one of the hands. A young maidservant on intimate terms with the farmer, who had prospects of taking the wife's place upon her demise, was sentenced to ten years in the house of correction. — The zeal with which the crime was deliberated over a long period, and the manifold attempts to drive the poor woman to despair or otherwise eliminate her, open a sad window into the depravity of people belonging to a class generally believed to possess strict religiosity; and the thought involuntarily arises that observing external pious practices does not necessarily equate to true inner devotion. Regarding the manner in which the sentence was carried out, we believe to have observed that the gathering of spectators turned the somber act of justice into a mere spectacle, failing to absorb that impression which defenders of the deterrence theory would like to attribute to such an execution. How much more worthily did the ancient state conceive of capital punishment by offering the criminal the cup of poison. For the harrowing, dreadful essence of this penalty does not lie in its outward execution, but in the fact that justice is the supreme power, which nothing may resist in case of conflict, and before which every individual right and welfare must yield.