XIAFTER THE TRIAL
Since the conviction of Sacco and Vanzetti on July 14th 1921, that shocked a large part of humanity as has no legal decision since Dreyfus was sent to Devil’s Island, the Defense Committee, backed up by contributions from all over the United States and from every part of the world where a labor movement exists has managed so far to stave off the sentence. The motion for a new trial that has just been denied was the seventh; first under Fred H. Moore and later under William G. Thompson, an eminent Boston attorney, president of a committee of the Massachusetts Bar Association, who has had the courage and sense of duty as citizens to take up vigorously and at the risk of loss of practice and friends an unpopular cause. It is largely due to Mr. Thompson’s personal influence and his general reputation for conservatism and integrity that lawyers and ministers and college professors and newspaper readers generally are becoming interested in the case. Now that theBoston Heraldhas come out editorially for a new trial, and suggested the appointment of an unprejudiced commission to review the whole course of the case, there is growing, if belated, agitation in liberal and intellectual circles. The people of Massachusetts are beginning to get an inkling of the fact that in so grave a miscarriage of justice there is more at stake than the lives of two Italian radicals.
The first motion for a retrial argued in October 1921 was based on the claim that the verdict was not in accord with the evidence. It was denied.
Four more motions were based on newly discovered evidence. The first charged irregularities in the jury room. The foreman of the jury, Ripley, a former Chief of Police of Quincy, who must have carried great weight with his fellow jurors, stated to the defense that he had in his pockets at the trial some cartridges of similar make and calibre to some of those in evidence, and that there was some discussion between him and other jurors about them. Presumably they were used for purposes of comparison and inference. At all events such secret evidence directly violates the conception of due process of law, which insists that a man shall have the opportunity to subject to the test of cross-examination all evidence offered against him. A friend of Ripley’s also gave an affidavit to the effect that Ripley, before the trial and knowing he was to sit on the jury, said to him, “Damn them, (Sacco and Vanzetti), they ought to hang them, anyway.”
The motion was denied.
The second motion for a new trial was based on the testimony of Louis Pelser. Prior to the trial, according to the defense’s affidavits, Pelser said that he witnessed the shooting of the paymaster and his guard. He saw a wounded man sink into the roadway, and because the bullets were firing toward the window of the Rice & Hutchins factory, where he worked, he dropped under a bench and did not move until the bandit-car crossed the railroad tracks 500 feet away. At least, this was his story to an investigator for the defense.
On the witness stand, however, Pelser made a positive identification of Sacco as one of the bandits. On cross-examination he said he had lied to the defense’s investigators. Four months afterward he signed a long affidavit saying that his original statement was true, that the testimony he gave at the trial was untrue and that he gave it because he was coerced by the District Attorney. In his affidavit he asserted that the words: “He (Sacco) is the dead image” of the bandit were put into his mouth by the District Attorney.
Six months later Pelser recanted his recantation in a statement to the District Attorney. This time he said his statement to the defense’s investigator was untrue, that his trial testimonywas true, that the statement made after trial was untrue and the last statement to the District Attorney true.
In connection with the second motion the defense filed an affidavit sworn to by Roy E. Gould, an itinerant vendor of razor paste, who alleges that the bandit on the right-hand side of the fleeing car fired at him and that a bullet went through his coat. He was arrested by the police, but was released when he convinced them of his innocence. He told the officers that he would be able to identify the bandits, and gave them his name and address. The prosecution did not call Gould. Through the mention of his name in a newspaper article the defense, after laborious search through half a dozen States, found him at Portland, Me., eight months after the trial. He was confronted with the convicted men and swore that they were not the bandits he saw on the day of the shooting. Motion denied.
The defense, in its third motion for a new trial, produced affidavits to show that Carlos E. Goodridge, one of the prosecution’s important witnesses, had a criminal record in several States. At the trial Goodridge said he rushed out of a poolroom on hearing the shots, observed the bandit-car whizzing by and saw Sacco in the front seat, and that Sacco tried to shoot him.
It so happened that some months before the trial one of the defense counsel had been instrumental in prosecuting Goodridge on a charge of having stolen a victrola. The news of the arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti on May 5, 1920, was followed by the visit to the jail of many who said they had seen the bandits. Goodridge, the defense asserted, did not go. However, he was taken to court to plead guilty on the same day that Sacco and Vanzetti were taken to court. Subsequently he told the prosecution that he recognized the two Italians and was let out on probation.
The affidavits of Goodridge’s life presented by the defense cover 160 pages. His real name was stated to be Erastus Corning Whitney. He is said to have been convicted in New York of grand larceny before reaching his twentyfirst year. After serving a three-year sentence he received his freedom and a year later was again arrested for stealing a relative’s jewelry. His second conviction was for a term of three years. Upon hisrelease he began stealing horses. He was indicted for stealing a horse and buggy. The affidavits signed by District Attorneys, sheriffs, ministers and others declared that Goodridge’s reputation for veracity was bad, that he was a petty thief, a swindler of women, and a confidence man. Motion denied.
The fourth motion for a new trial was concerned with the testimony of Lola R. Andrews. According to the defense’s affidavits Mrs. Andrews was interviewed by them five months before the trial. She said she did not see Sacco, and her description of the man she saw, according to the defense, was not that of Sacco. “He is not the man,” she said upon seeing photographs of Sacco. The night before she was called by the Commonwealth she told defense counsel that she did not know why she was being called as she could not identify anybody.
Next day she made a positive identification of Sacco. Cross-examined on the stenographic notes of her conversation with defense counsel she said the stenographer had not transcribed his notes honestly. She branded as a lie the statement made by the lawyer for the defense. During her cross-examination she fainted three times and was assisted from the room.
In an affidavit sworn to by Mrs. Andrews nine months after the trial she declared that her original statement before trial was true, and that her trial testimony was untrue and had been given under the coercion and intimidation of the District Attorney’s office, which threatened to reveal her private life.
(Six months later Mrs. Andrews, in a statement to the District Attorney’s office, said that her first statement to the defense lawyer was false, her trial testimony true, her subsequent affidavit to the defense counsel untrue and her last statement true). Motion denied.
The fifth motion for a new trial was concerned with the exceedingly important gun-and-bullet testimony. The Commonwealth held that the bullet that killed Berardelli was fired from Sacco’s pistol. Two gun experts for the defense said it was not.
The Commonwealth’s experts were Captain Charles A. Van Amburgh of the Remington Arms Works and Captain William H. Proctor, for thirty years head of the Massachusetts State Police.
According to the new evidence placed before the court, Captain Proctor states that he had the death bullet and the Sacco pistol in his possession for more than a year before the trial and that with Mr. Van Amburgh he conducted certain tests with Sacco’s pistol. In his affidavit, made on Oct. 22, 1923, more than two and a half years after the trial, Captain Proctor stated that at the trial and at the moment of making the affidavit he was entirely unconvinced that the mortal bullet had passed through Sacco’s pistol. He said:
“At no time was I able to find any evidence whatever which tended to convince me that the particular mortal bullet found in Berardelli’s body, which came from a Colt automatic pistol, which I think was numbered 3 and had some other exhibit number, came from Sacco’s pistol, and I so informed the District Attorney and his assistants before the trial.
“This bullet was what is commonly called a full metal patch bullet, and, although I repeatedly talked over with Captain Van Amburg the scratch or scratches which he claimed tended to identify this bullet as one that must have gone through Sacco’s pistol, his statements concerning the identifying marks seemed to me entirely unconvincing.
“At the trial the District Attorney did not ask me whether I had found any evidence that the so-called mortal bullet, which I have referred to as number 3, passed through Sacco’s pistol, nor was I asked that question in cross-examination. The District Attorney desired to ask me that question, but I had repeatedly told him that if he did I should be obliged to answer in the negative; consequently he put to me this question:
“Q. ‘Have you an opinion as to whether bullet number 3 was fired from the Colt automatic which is in evidence?’ To which I answered, ‘I have’.
“He then proceeded, Q. ‘And what is your opinion?’ A. ‘My opinion is that it is consistent with being fired by that pistol.’
“That is still my opinion, for the reason that bullet number 3, in my judgment, passed through some Colt automatic pistol; but I do not intend by that answer to imply that the so-called mortal bullet had passed through this particular Colt automatic pistol, and the District Attorney well knew that I did not so intend, and framed his question accordingly. Had I been asked the direct question, whether I found any affirmative evidencewhatever that this so-called mortal bullet had passed through this particular Sacco’s pistol, I should have answered then, as I do now, without hesitation, in the negative.”
Frederick G. Katzmann, who was District Attorney at the time of the trial, and Harold P. Williams, later his successor, filed affidavits on this motion. Mr. Katzmann stated that Captain Proctor told him that it was his opinion that the mortal bullet had been fired from “a” Colt automatic pistol. He did not say that it had been fired from Sacco’s pistol. Mr. Williams said that Captain Proctor could not tell through what pistol the mortal bullet had been fired. He also denied that Captain Proctor’s attention had been “repeatedly” called to the question whether he could find any evidence which would justify the opinion that the death bullet came from the Sacco pistol.
In a sense the gun-and-bullet testimony is the crux of the case, for Judge Thayer, in his charge to the jury, said in substance that the jurors should consider Captain Proctor’s testimony that the death bullet passed through Sacco’s pistol. In his summary the District Attorney said to the jury, “You might disregard all the identification testimony and base your verdict on the testimony of these experts.”
Additional new evidence to prove that the death bullet could not have been fired from Sacco’s pistol was furnished to the court in the micro-photographs made by Albert H. Hamilton, who has offered expert testimony in many murder trials in which photographs taken under a compound microscope have been placed in evidence.
Taking the mortal bullet and test bullets fired through Sacco’s pistol, Mr. Hamilton pointed out several markings in the mortal bullet which he said did not appear in those that were fired as a test. The prosecution sought to show many similarities in the marking of both exhibits.
Photographs of Mr. Hamilton showed that the shell which the Commonwealth claimed had been fired from Sacco’s pistol had a dent in the exact centre where the firing pin struck it. The test shells, it was said, had dents 23 degrees off centre. The prosecution urged that both were so nearly in the middle as to make it certain that all had been fired from the same pistol.
There followed the appeal to the Supreme Judicial Court in January 1926. Despite a masterly argument by counsel for the defense the appeal was unanimously denied.
Meanwhile new evidence had been discovered, the affidavits of Letherman and Weyand tended to prove the contention of the defense that their radicalism had been a deciding factor in these men’s conviction. The confession of Madeiros and the circumstantial case erected by the defense tending to prove that the South Braintree crime had been committed by the Morelli gang of Providence (a case that though circumstantial seems to a layman infinitely better founded than the state’s case against Sacco and Vanzetti) gave the friends of Sacco and Vanzetti fresh hope that at last a new trial would be granted. The motions were denied.
Now there is only the growing force of public opinion between Sacco and Vanzetti and the electric chair. A new appeal to the Supreme Judicial Court is being prepared, but it seems hardly likely that the court will reverse its firmly-entrenched decision. There remains the faint hope of an appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States on the plea that the men were convicted without due process of law.
Will the people of this country and the citizens of Massachusetts stand by and see two men murdered by the dead weight of legal technicalities? Madeiros, murderer and gunman, was granted a second trial, on the plea that the judge had neglected to inform the jury that they should deem a man innocent until he was proven guilty. It is hard for anyone not versed in subtleties of the law to see why the same thing should not apply to Sacco and Vanzetti. The words were probably pronounced solemnly enough, but can anyone who has read over the account of the trial solemnly affirm that the spirit was there?
“So you left Plymouth to dodge the draft, did you?” was Katzmann’s first question to Vanzetti on the stand. “Did you love your country in the last week of May, 1917? Is your love for the United States commensurate with the amount of money you can get in this country per week? Did you intend to condemnHarvard College?” were some of the questions put to Sacco—many of them really invitations to an argument. And Sacco was induced, and allowed by the judge, to make a long speech on his offensive political opinions. Katzmann’s address to the jury ended with the words “stand together, you men of Norfolk County!” And Judge Thayer’s charge opened as follows: “Gentlemen of the Jury, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts called upon you to render a most important service. Although you knew that such service would be arduous, painful and tiresome, yet you, like the true soldier, responded to that call in the spirit of supreme American loyalty.” After three pages of this, he proceeds: “Having cleared away any mist of sympathy or prejudice from your minds and having substituted there trust, a purer atmosphere of unyielding impartiality and absolute fairness, let us take up some of the rights granted by law to the defendants....”
The men of Norfolk County stood together as best they knew, to defend their institutions against reds, slackers, foreign agitators. Twelve doughboys trying a German spy would have brought the same verdict. “Damn them, they ought to hang them anyway” was the foreman’s opinion.
That was the history of the case from the outside. What was happening to the two men in jail? Hope and despair in sickening alternations, and then at last a sort of numbness. They, each of them, had moments of breakdown. At one time Vanzetti was put in a cell near the heating plant in Charlestown jail from which he could hear the hammering of men getting the electric chair ready for an execution. It wore on his nerves until the prison authorities became alarmed and sent him to the State Asylum for observation. There he was found to be perfectly sane.
But Vanzetti serving out his sentence at Charlestown, at least has work to keep him busy. In Dedham jail there is no provision for giving work to prisoners awaiting sentence. Except for the daily hour of exercise, Sacco has spent the whole six years shut up in a cell. At first he used to go through all sorts of exercises to keep himself fit; but inevitably the hopelessness of it got to him. He went on a hunger strike. Afterthirtyone days he was removed, a wreck, to the State Farm at Bridgewater. There he was allowed to do outside work. Once he was well he was moved back to Dedham again for more days and weeks and months of waiting. The thing that keeps these two men alive and sane is their faith in themselves as champions, martyrs of the working class. Vanzetti is very fond of the phrase of St. Augustine.The blood of martyrs is the seed of liberty.
For through the bars and walls of their jails these men must have felt an inkling of the great heroic shadows they throw on the minds of working men all over the world. In Russia, in Germany, in France, in the Argentine, people have been profoundly moved by every step in the case. There have been meetings, parades, bombs thrown, heads broken for Sacco and Vanzetti, among men whose languages they may never know, the names of whose towns they never heard. History is made up of these sudden searchlights that for a moment make gigantic the drama of a single humble man.
The tangible proof of this feeling is in the contributions that pour in steadily to the Defense Committee, mostly collected from poor people, in small sums, from people to whom giving up a dollar or two means missing meals or cigarettes or moving picture shows. In the month of June 1926 contributions came in from Chicago, Newark, Pensacola, Fla., Kalispell, Mont., Baltimore, Bound Rock, N. J., Bass River, Mass., New York, Buffalo, Boston, Sandusky, Detroit, Zanesville, O., San Diego, Oshkosh, Tulsa, London, England, Pueblo, Colo., Coney Island, Balboa, San Francisco ... and a couple of hundred other places. Whatever the outcome, the passionate effort evoked by this case will have been a great proof, if not of working class strength, at least of working class solidarity.
With the backing of the Italian population of the towns round Boston and of a few liberal-minded Americans of old families who had enough imagination and good citizenship to see that justice was dangerously miscarrying, the Defense Committee has carried on the case. They have been gravely hampered by a lack of knowledge of American customs, and by the direct action of certain underground forces. There werefound to be undercover men working as collectors. Frank R. Lopez, an active member of the Committee, was deported to Spain. Then there was the still unsolved De Falco case.
One morning in January 1921 a certain Angelina De Falco, who claimed to be a court interpreter at Dedham, called at the office of the Defense Committee accompanied by a certain Cicchetti of Providence and offered to get Sacco off in the trial that was to come. After several meetings during which the woman tried to gain the confidence of Felicani and Guadagni, two of the members of the Committee, she declared herself to be an emissary of District Attorney Katzmann and of the clerk of the court at Dedham. More meetings in restaurants and cafes. At length she made them believe that for a certain sum of money she could get off both Sacco and Vanzetti. But at the next interview she came back to her original statement that she could only get Sacco off; Vanzetti was too difficult on account of the previous conviction. Then Guadagni said there was nothing doing. The committee was out to prove the innocence of both men. She said that it would cost a great deal; the District Attorney and his assistants and the foreman of the jury would all have to be fixed; there would be a mock trial and the two men would be acquitted. The morning of January 5th Mrs. De Falco telephoned the Committee, presumably from Dedham, that everything was O. K. The seventh they were supposed to go to Dedham to settle the matter.
The lawyers for the defense, fearing a trap, suggested that Mrs. De Falco be invited to discuss terms in Boston instead of in Dedham. A good deal annoyed she came into the office at 32 Battery Street. A dictaphone had been put in to register the conversation. There in the presence of Felicani, Guadagni, Mrs. Sproul and Orciani she repeated her proposition. The price of the two men’s liberty was forty thousand dollars. It was explained to her that they had no such sum on hand. She said that if an advance of five thousand was paid, the case would be adjourned till the autumn session in order to give the Committee all summer to raise the money.
“And if the money is not raised will they be convicted?” asked Mrs. Sproul and Guadagni. “Certainly,” replied AngelinaDe Falco. Negotiations dragged on. Chief Counsel Moore was of the opinion that they ought to swear out a complaint and have her arrested. They did so. The case was tried before Judge Francis Murray in Boston, who dismissed the charges, completely exonerating Mr. Katzmann, ruling that Mrs. De Falco had been ‘indiscreet’, but not guilty of a criminal act.
Of course Mrs. De Falco may simply have been trying to play a little game on her own, but the ugly doubt remains that there may have been more to it than that. If you turn back to the Boston papers of that period you will find that certain scandalous disclosures were being made as to the actions of the district attorneys of Suffolk and Middlesex counties.
Anyway that’s the last that was heard of Angelina De Falco. The mystery is still unsolved.
What is going to be done if the Supreme Judicial Court continues to refuse Sacco and Vanzetti a new trial? Are Sacco and Vanzetti going to burn in the Chair?
The conscience of the people of Massachusetts must be awakened. Working people, underdogs, reds know instinctively what is going on. The same thing has happened before. But the average law-admiring, authority-respecting citizen does not know. For the first time, since Judge Thayer’s last denial of motions for a new trial, there has been a certain awakening among the influential part of the community, the part of the community respected by the press and the bench and the pulpit. Always there have been notable exceptions, but up to now these good citizens have had no suspicion that anything but justice was being meted out by the courts. Goaded by theNew York Worldeditorials, by Chief Counsel Thompson’s eloquence, by theBoston Herald’scourageous change of front, they are getting uneasy. It remains to be seen what will come of this uneasiness. TheBoston Heraldsuggests an impartial commission to review the whole case. All that is needed is that the facts of the case be generally known.
Everyone must work to that end, no matter what happens, that the facts of the case may be known so that no one can plead ignorance, so that if these men are killed, everyone in theState, everyone in the country will have the guilt on them. So that no one can say “I would have protested but I didn’t know what was being done.”
Tell your friends, write to your congressmen, to the political bosses of your district, to the newspapers. Demand the truth about Sacco and Vanzetti. Call meetings, try to line up trade unions, organizations, clubs, put up posters. Demand the truth about Sacco and Vanzetti.
If the truth had been told they would be free men today.
If the truth is not told they will burn in the Chair in Charlestown Jail. If they die what little faith many millions of men have in the chance of Justice in this country will die with them.
Save Sacco and Vanzetti.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTESP.7, changed “Aside from the disgustingly farcical nature of the trial which could and should have ended in fifteen minutes in that masterclass court, the refined malice and barbaric cruelty of these capitalist tribunals, high and low, may read in the insufferable torture inflicted thru six long, agonizing years upon their imprisoned and helpless victims” to “Aside from the disgustingly farcical nature of the trial which could and should have ended in fifteen minutes in that masterclass court, the refined malice and barbaric cruelty of these capitalist tribunals, high and low, may be read in the insufferable torture inflicted thru six long, agonizing years upon their imprisoned and helpless victims”.Silently corrected obvious typographical errors and variations in spelling.Retained archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as printed.
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