Moore asked the jury to consider again whether or not the defendants believed on the night of May 5 they were in fear of deportation or that they believed their lives or liberties were in danger, and whether Stewart’s questions about anarchism had not inflamed Sacco’s suspicions. There were, too, Sacco’s alibi witnesses for April 15—Bosco, Dentamore, Williams, Affe, Kelley, Hayes. Had all these men committed perjury?
Only in passing did Moore mention the guns and bullets. “If,” he said, “the time has come when a microscope must be used to determine whether a human life is going to function or not and when the users of the microscope themselves can’t agree, when experts called by the Commonwealth and experts called by the defense are sharply defined in their disagreements, then I take it that ordinary men such as you and I should well hesitate to take a human life. You are the responsible men,” he concluded. “You are the judges of the facts.” And he stood there a moment staring somberly at the jurors.
“Take a recess of five minutes,” Judge Thayer told the courtroom, then nodding curtly to the Californian, added, “You ran over your time twenty minutes, Mr. Moore.”
Jerry McAnarney, in his two hours, did not confine himself to his ostensible client, Vanzetti, but proceeded to go over the same ground that Moore had just covered. He criticized the Splaine-Devlin contradictions, he asked why Sacco and Vanzetti had not been shown to witnesses in Brockton in a lineup, he speculated as to what Goodridge had been doing in Dedham when he first identified Sacco. Then he asked why Sacco, already recognizable in South Braintree as Mosmacotelli, would have spent a morning standing in front of the drugstore or hanging around the depot or finally leaning on the fence under the window of the very factory where he had once worked.
The testy little lawyer warned the jurors about Katzmann: “He can stand up to this rail and say to you gentlemen ‘What have we been here for six weeks for, for two slackers, for two men who did not think enough of their country but what they would go to Mexico—murderers, slackers, anarchists?’ Ring the changes, gentlemen, and you can play any tune you want to on that. And you have got to be very careful that you don’t vibrate in unison with those words. They are fearful, they are potent, they are laden to the limit.”
McAnarney poked fun at the bravado of the Brockton officer, Connolly, “listening to the sweetest music of his young life, the sound of Connolly’s voice when he was telling you what he did.” But when McAnarney mentioned Levangie, the man he had interviewed and who two weeks later had denied under oath talking with him, his face reddened. Captain Van Amburgh he referred to as the “circles” man, but he had obviously not grasped the implications of his testimony, for he reminded the jury: “Van Amburgh said that that number three shell, the fatal bullet that killed Berardelli, came from ... the Colt revolver that was found on Sacco.” In the question of Berardelli’s revolver McAnarney pointed out that if the defense had planned to falsify evidence, it would not have been too difficult to have the various witnesses memorize the number of Vanzetti’s Harrington & Richardson and afterward recite it on the witness stand.
McAnarney asserted, as had Moore, that the primary fact was in the end identification, and that there was not sufficient evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the two men had been in South Braintree that day. “I want every man on this panel to treat these two defendants as if they were your own individual brother,” he concluded with sincere irrelevance. “Take that as the text, not the other that we feel and what this evidence would make them out, treat them as though, as your brother. He came to this world by the same power that created you, and may he go from this world by the same power that takes you. I thank you, gentlemen.”
After the lunch hour Katzmann approached the jury box for his final argument. As usual his debonair appearance was unaffected by the heat. Confident of the game he was playing, sure of his arguments, he faced the jury in the floridity of his top form. But though his verbiage was lush, his mind was sharp.
He began with provincial urbanity by complimenting the jury, the defending lawyers, and the judge. Then he covered the case point by point, missing none of the discrepancies of the defense witnesses and not neglecting by innuendo to tie in Orciani. There was Burke who had said that Sacco and Vanzetti were not in the car as it passed him, Burke who had ridden to court in Callahan’s Hudson and called it a Buick, who had described the driver of the getaway Buick as a thickset dark man—when both sides now admitted that the driver was pale and fair. There was Chase, on the truck at the Co-operative Society, a man with permanently impaired eyesight. There were Sacco’s alibi witnesses in Boston and Vanzetti’s in Plymouth. Katzmann agreed that Corl had painted his boat, that Williams had taken his advertising orders, that Dentamore had gone to a banquet for the Transcript editor. “But what in logic is the connection between any of these things that they say helps mark the time?”