On a secondary level the dream was Sacco’s acceptance of his execution, which he saw as predetermined, inevitable. Vanzetti, on the other hand, was optimistic until almost the end. Even Webster Thayer, in whom all the forces inimical to him and to Sacco seemed concentrated, he could view with the dispassionateness of his note to the Brinis just after the arguments on the supplementary motions: “I dislike to vilify humane being and would be more than glad, happy—if he by one just act, would comples me to change my opinion—but there are no reasons till now.”
A few months later, discouraged from any such fugitive hopes, Vanzetti reverted to a more somber picture of the judge:
I have never expected, nor I expect from him other than some then thousand volts divided in a few times; some meters of cheap bord and 4 x 7 x 8 feet hol in the ground.
No matter how much of sympathy I try to bestow upon him, or with how much of understanding I try to judge his actions; I only and alone can see him a self-conceit nerroved mind little tyrent, beliving himself to be just, and beliving his utterly unjust and unnecessary social office to be a necessity and a good. He is a bigot and, therefore, cruel. At the time of our arrest and trials, his peers were sawing red all around, and he was sawing more red than his peers.
Nineteen twenty-four was the year of indecision when, after Hamilton’s discomfiture over the pistol barrels, the legal clockwork seemed to have run down, when Judge Thayer—who alone might have rewound it—was again ailing, when no one could even guess the date of his decisions on the supplementary motions. Vanzetti, at the time Sacco was turning his back on visitors, became so frustrated by the suspense that for a while he considered going on a hunger strike. “I am tired—tired—tired!” he wrote early in the autumn. “I asked if to live like now for love of life is not, rather than wisdom or heroism, mere cowardness.”
From July until September the courts closed for the long recess. In the yard of the Dedham jail during the exercise period the prisoners hung about languidly under the shadow of the wall. At Charlestown the sun beating down on the slate roofs set the air smoldering. In such weather the excremental smell of drains seemed to ooze from the very stones of the old building. Vanzetti noted that it must be equally fetid in the narrow streets of the North End.
Those who could get away fled the heat. Judge Thayer had gone to his cottage at Falmouth, on Cape Cod where, with the breeze cutting in from across Buzzards Bay, he spent the mornings working on his decisions on the five supplementary motions. The close of summer did not see his task at an end. Not until the first of October did he at last file his findings in the clerk’s office at Dedham.
The news flashed across the Boston papers in blacker headlines than any that had appeared since the conviction. Thayer had denied all five motions!
With regard to the Ripley motion Thayer found “that said Ripley brought with him innocently and thoughtlessly the said three cartridges ... that whatever Ripley said or did in relation to said three cartridges, he never intended to prejudice in any manner the rights of the defendants.” Hamilton had made an affidavit claiming that the Ripley shells showed signs of having been pushed into Vanzetti’s revolver. Thayer pointed out that the other jurors had sworn that Ripley had not exhibited the bullets in the jury room, and there would have been no other opportunity. He considered that any comparison Ripley made between his own cartridges and the exhibits must have been a mental one, since, although jurors had seen the Ripley bullets in the dormitory downstairs, no one had seen them elsewhere.
The basic claim of the defense was that there had been an improper exhibit in the jury room. Certainly Ripley’s three bullets were improperly, if accidentally, there. But Thayer’s finding seems reasonable: “The mere production of the Ripley cartridges and the talk or discussion about them did not create such disturbing or prejudicial influence that might in any way affect the verdict.