Francesco's beautiful teenage daughter, Beatrice, confides in her mother that she intends to take the cloth and enter a convent, as much to escape from her abusive father as for spiritual reasons.

In another flashback, Beatrice is released from her father's dungeon after nearly one year in solitary confinement by Francesco to celebrate news that her two older brothers were killed in war.

A little later that night, Francisco confronts Beatrice in an upstairs bedroom, drunkenly rips off his daughter's black dress and stands swaying over her before he rapes her.

Beatrice calls in her stepmother to help her clean up the mess and gets her little brother to help her carry the dead Francesco onto the ramparts of the castle to throw him off to make it look like an accident.

In the present day, the whole Cenci family is implicated in the murder either as participants or accessories and under Catholic Church law, they are condemned to death.

The prosecutor in the case, Cardinal Lanciani, attempts to write a statement implicating Beatrice to Olimpio, who has been repeatedly tortured to extract a confession about the Cenci family's involvement.

The planned execution begins causing great unrest among the people of Rome who feel that Beatrice was justified in killing her father who besmirched her honor.