The jury retired at 10:15. Henry Burgess, the foreman, was curious about what was inside the shotgun shells and just before lunch he opened two of them. They were loaded, not with birdshot, but buckshot. Simon Sullivan and several of the other jurors took a few of the pellets as souvenirs.
After the lunch recess the jury resumed deliberation. At 4:18 it brought in its verdict, finding Vanzetti guilty of assault with intent to rob and guilty on three counts of assault with intent to murder. As the foreman pronounced the word “guilty,” a protesting wail broke out from the thickset peasant women in the back of the courtroom. Vanzetti remained calm. “Coraggio!” he called out to them as he was led away.
The echo of Vanzetti’s voice subsided into the dusty calm of legal decorum. Vanzetti’s friends moved toward the exits, looking back now and then at the men filing out of the jury box. Judge Thayer, after Vahey and Graham had stepped forward to consult with him, extended the time for filing exceptions to August 18 and set bail at twenty-five thousand dollars.
Several days later Juror Sullivan happened to run into Judge Thayer in a Brockton store and mention that he and a couple of others had taken away some of the buckshot. Judge Thayer ordered him to see that all of it was at once returned to the district attorney. The chastened Sullivan brought the pellets back, and Katzmann warned him not to say anything more about the matter.
On August 16 Vahey filed a bill of exceptions in which he requested that the shotgun-shell evidence and the testimony of Simon and Ruth Johnson be excluded. The exceptions were not allowed, and Vahey did not carry the matter further. On that same morning, in the almost-deserted courtroom, Vanzetti appeared for sentencing. He stood in the dock, an alien, slightly bent figure, flanked by his guards, with high forehead and high cheekbones and flowing mustache. The heat of the day had not yet set in, and the oval windows were open. If the prisoner had glanced to his left he could have looked down Brewster Street to the blue line of Plymouth Harbor. Instead, he stared ahead at Judge Thayer sitting on the dais beneath the Plymouth seal, and the judge stared back from the mask of his withered face.
Then Judge Thayer began to pronounce sentence in his precise dessicated voice, the phrases falling like a curtain: “The Court having considered the offense whereof the said Bartolomeo Vanzetti is convict does order and adjudge that the said Bartolomeo Vanzetti suffer imprisonment for a term of not less than twelve years nor more than fifteen years, one day thereof solitary imprisonment and the residue of said term confinement to hard labor, in and within the limits of our State Prison situate in Boston in our County of Suffolk.”
FOOTNOTES:
[4] The preliminary hearing on his participation in the South Braintree murders followed on May 26 before Judge Avery in the Quincy District Court. Sacco, against whom the evidence seemed more substantial, had appeared in the Quincy Court on May 8.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE YEAR BETWEEN
A few days after the arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti their typesetter friend Aldino Felicani organized a defense committee among the East Boston anarchists. The seventeen members were skilled workers—one was a building contractor—but they were men detached from American life, distrustful of outsiders. The freeing of their comrades from the ominous charge hanging over them was, they felt, their affair. Their first pamphlet, published in Italian, appealed to “Men of Good Will.”