We’re going to be deported, thought Sacco and Vanzetti, and naturally did their best not to implicate their friends and comrades.
The fact that they were armed was a piece of horrible bad luck. If it hadn’t been for the revolvers and shotgun shells found on them they would probably have been released as was Orciani whom the police picked up a couple of days later. But why were they armed, everybody asks. Vanzetti had bought the gun to protect his earnings as a fishpeddler. It was a time of many holdups. Sacco was accustomed to carry a gun as night watchman at the Three K’s Factory. A great many people of all classes get a feeling of strength and manhood out of toting a gun. Put yourself in their place. Haven’t there been times when you who are reading this would have been pretty embarrassed to explain your actions if suddenly arrested and bullied and crossquestioned by a lot of bulls in a station house? Add to that the chance connection of revolvers, shells, the draft of an anarchist leaflet. Many a man has died in the Chair on flimsier evidence than that. That’s always the answer of the man in the street when you press him about this case. Many a good guy’s been electrocuted on less than that.
It’s time that you realized fully, you who are reading this, man or woman, laborer or whitecollar worker, that if Sacco and Vanzetti die in the Chair as the result of a frameup based on an unlucky accident, your chance of life will be that much slimmer, if you ever come to be arrested as a result of a similar unlucky chain of circumstances. Justice can’t be embalmed in the dome of a courthouse. It’s got to be worked for, fought for daily by those who want it for themselves and for their neighbors.
A great many men and women do realize it. That’s why Sacco and Vanzetti are alive today.
So it was that it was as a convicted highway robber that Vanzetti was tried for murder with Sacco. If it hadn’t been for that fact it would have been much harder to convict the two men at Dedham.
By one of those agreements of counsel that seem so ghastly to a layman, the defense contracted not to produce character witnesses for Vanzetti, if the prosecution abstained from bringing up the previous conviction. It was a skeleton in the closet, never mentioned, but on everyone’s mind all through the trial.
X
THE DEDHAM TRIAL
Sacco and Vanzetti were found guilty of committing a $15,776 payroll robbery and murdering Frederick Parmenter, paymaster, and Alexander Berardelli, payroll guard, at South Braintree, Mass., on April 15, 1920. Parmenter and Berardelli were employees of the Slater and Morrill Shoe Company.
Both defendants were tried before Superior Judge Webster Thayer at Dedham in June and July 1921, the trial extending seven weeks, and were convicted of first degree murder by a jury which the defense attorneys contend was irregularly and illegally selected. The verdict carries a penalty of death in the electric chair.
The crime was committed at 3.05 p. m. on Pearl street, in front of the four-story Rice and Hutchins shoe factory. This building was filled with workers. Four rows of windows looked out upon the scene of the shooting. While the glass in them was opaque, as soon as the shots were heard, many windows were thrown open.