This was the first time Dever had ever been to Dedham. As he walked from the railroad station through the square he kept thinking what a pleasant town it was. Above the masking elms he could see a white dome with round windows in it like portholes. That, he supposed, was the courthouse. He wandered up and down several of the side streets before heading for the domed building.
Never before had he been inside a court, and the neoclassic building with its marble-tiled floors and marble stairs and marble-paneled walls awed him. With the other veniremen he was taken to the courthouse, where Judge Thayer first explained the procedure and then exhorted them to perform their disagreeable duties as patriotically as the American soldier boy in France.
“What, gentlemen, does the law seek to accomplish?” he concluded. “It seeks to select twelve jurors who will stand between these parties, the Commonwealth on the one hand and these defendants on the other, with an unyielding impartiality and absolute fairness and unflinching courage in order that truth and justice shall prevail, for, gentlemen, verdicts must rest upon truth and justice in order that the life, the liberties, and the properties of the people of the Commonwealth, including the defendants, shall be secure and protected.”
John Dever was impressed not only by the rhetoric but by the whole formalized proceedings. To him Judge Thayer seemed “a sincere, honest, absolutely fair and impartial man.” Dever was not called during the morning. At one o’clock he ate a sandwich and a piece of pie at Gilbert’s Lunch, a one-arm in the square. When he returned to the courthouse it was still too early for the afternoon session. He sat on the back grass plot with some of the other men. Dever said he hoped he would not be picked, because he might lose his two weeks’ vacation. “Don’t worry,” a man wearing a Red Men’s badge told him. “You’ll be challenged. You’re too young. Besides they don’t want any of you fellows on this jury.” He pointed to the ex-serviceman’s pin in Dever’s buttonhole. “They’ll show you right out the front door,” he concluded.
Afterward Dever could not remember much about the afternoon. One by one the names were called, one by one the veniremen disappeared. No jurymen had been picked during the morning and only two after lunch: Frank Marden, a mason from Weymouth; and a slightly deaf, slightly senile retired farmer with a handlebar mustache, Walter Ripley, who raised bulldogs and called himself a stockkeeper. For all his challenging, Moore did not spot the fact that Ripley had once been chief of the police and fire departments in Quincy. It was not until eight o’clock that Dever’s name was finally called. He was led into the courtroom. Thayer asked him a few questions and then announced, “The juror stands indifferent.”
I looked in front of me [Dever recalled] and saw a whole battery of attorneys, eight or nine in all, I should say. Before I had a chance to orient myself a man whom I was to know as District Attorney Katzmann stood on his feet and said “the Commonwealth accepts the juror.” Well, I thought to myself, the defense will now challenge me. I looked at the defense table and saw four attorneys looking at a very large book. They would look in the book, then look hard at me; and then whisper to each other. That went on for what seemed to be six or seven minutes. I began to feel I was on trial. I turned in the witness stand getting ready to leave, Judge Thayer glanced at me and said, “Stay right where you are, young man, we are waiting for these gentlemen,” and looked at the defense table. After about two more looks at me, Mr. Jeremiah McAnarney stood up and said, “If your Honor please, both defendants accept the juror.”
Dever was the sixth juror accepted. A few minutes later the court adjourned. The six jurors were taken to the ground floor room of the Court of Probate and Insolvency, where twelve iron cots from the county jail had been set up. There they were locked in for the night.
When Dever woke the next morning, he thought at first he was in a lecture hall. Then he remembered. He got up, washed, and fixed his hair with the brush and comb the sheriff had given each juror. He was not given a razor. At eight o’clock a deputy appeared and took them to breakfast.
Almost at the beginning of the morning session the seventh juror, Lewis McHardy, an elderly quiet-mannered mill worker from Milton, was selected. Seventeen more veniremen filed past the bench. Then the sheriff informed the judge that his list of five hundred was exhausted.
According to the General Laws of Massachusetts, if such a situation occurs in a murder case after seven jurors have been chosen, “the Court shall cause jurors to be returned from the bystanders or from the county at large to complete the panel.” Judge Thayer cited the statute and ordered Sheriff Capen to have two hundred more men present by ten the next morning. The sheriff was doubtful. “They will jump,” he remarked, “when they see me coming.” He was right. The news got round, and almost before the afternoon session closed, the streets of Dedham and the adjoining towns were deserted.