I tell you that I am innocent of such crime, and no State tools, no perjuring harlots, crooks, criminals, venals, deficients, no Steward, no Copan, no black-guards, no thief as Ross, no Katzmann, no Williams, no sadism of jurors who had been ready to hang us before the beginning of the trial, no verdict of guiltness, no death sentence, no Webster Thayer, no Massachusetts, none of them nothing of this, not even all of this can change an innocent man in a guilty one.
And I tell you that Nicola Sacco is neither a thief nor a highway murderors and not even all of our enemies and of our case can make this truth untrue.
V
Judge Webster Thayer can denies us as many unrefutable and undenyable appeals and doom us at his heart content.
The Judges of the Massachusetts Supreme Judiciary Court can uphold Thayer’s “decision” at their heart content.
The Judges of the Supreme Court of the United State can uphold at their heart content both Thayer and the Massachusetts Justice: we will remain innocent.
Although Sacco had been able to walk from the death house to Cherry Hill, his sturdy peasant body was beginning to give way. On the thirtieth day of his strike Dr. McLaughlin, the prison physician, told him flatly that the time had come when he must eat. To emphasize this McLaughlin showed him a rubber tube three feet long, greased at one end for insertion in the nose and with a rubber bulb for pumping at the other end. Two guards had brought the men to the prison barber shop, where Vanzetti, Musmanno, and Rosina were waiting. Rosina, as she had done all along, begged her husband to eat. The others kept urging him. Sliding the tube between his fingers, Dr. McLaughlin told him: “You must eat. I can make you. I am stronger than you are.” Sacco smiled, took a mug of soup that one of the guards had poured out, lifted it, and said ironically, “Good health to all of you.”
The day after McHardy’s house was bombed, Hill appeared at the heavily guarded Pemberton Square Courthouse to argue the exceptions before the four available members of the Supreme Court. Impassively the justices listened to the familiar argument that Judge Thayer himself had become a defendant and that to allow him to hear any question concerning Sacco and Vanzetti was to make him a judge in his own case. Attorney General Reading countered that even if Thayer had been privately prejudiced, that would not disqualify him unless his prejudice had been communicated to the jury. The justices reserved their decision.
Three mornings later Court Reporter Grabill walked down the inner steps of the still-guarded courthouse with a copy of the Supreme Court decision. He handed it to Musmanno and Hill, at the same time informing the reporters: “Gentlemen, the exceptions in both cases have been overruled.”