“The consciousness of guilt” made so much of by Judge Thayer was the consciousness of the dead body of their comrade Salsedo lying smashed in the spring dawn two days before on the pavement of Park Row.
XI
AFTER THE TRIAL
Since the conviction of Sacco and Vanzetti on July 14th 1921, that shocked a large part of humanity as has no legal decision since Dreyfus was sent to Devil’s Island, the Defense Committee, backed up by contributions from all over the United States and from every part of the world where a labor movement exists has managed so far to stave off the sentence. The motion for a new trial that has just been denied was the seventh; first under Fred H. Moore and later under William G. Thompson, an eminent Boston attorney, president of a committee of the Massachusetts Bar Association, who has had the courage and sense of duty as citizens to take up vigorously and at the risk of loss of practice and friends an unpopular cause. It is largely due to Mr. Thompson’s personal influence and his general reputation for conservatism and integrity that lawyers and ministers and college professors and newspaper readers generally are becoming interested in the case. Now that the Boston Herald has come out editorially for a new trial, and suggested the appointment of an unprejudiced commission to review the whole course of the case, there is growing, if belated, agitation in liberal and intellectual circles. The people of Massachusetts are beginning to get an inkling of the fact that in so grave a miscarriage of justice there is more at stake than the lives of two Italian radicals.
The first motion for a retrial argued in October 1921 was based on the claim that the verdict was not in accord with the evidence. It was denied.
Four more motions were based on newly discovered evidence. The first charged irregularities in the jury room. The foreman of the jury, Ripley, a former Chief of Police of Quincy, who must have carried great weight with his fellow jurors, stated to the defense that he had in his pockets at the trial some cartridges of similar make and calibre to some of those in evidence, and that there was some discussion between him and other jurors about them. Presumably they were used for purposes of comparison and inference. At all events such secret evidence directly violates the conception of due process of law, which insists that a man shall have the opportunity to subject to the test of cross-examination all evidence offered against him. A friend of Ripley’s also gave an affidavit to the effect that Ripley, before the trial and knowing he was to sit on the jury, said to him, “Damn them, (Sacco and Vanzetti), they ought to hang them, anyway.”
The motion was denied.
The second motion for a new trial was based on the testimony of Louis Pelser. Prior to the trial, according to the defense’s affidavits, Pelser said that he witnessed the shooting of the paymaster and his guard. He saw a wounded man sink into the roadway, and because the bullets were firing toward the window of the Rice & Hutchins factory, where he worked, he dropped under a bench and did not move until the bandit-car crossed the railroad tracks 500 feet away. At least, this was his story to an investigator for the defense.
On the witness stand, however, Pelser made a positive identification of Sacco as one of the bandits. On cross-examination he said he had lied to the defense’s investigators. Four months afterward he signed a long affidavit saying that his original statement was true, that the testimony he gave at the trial was untrue and that he gave it because he was coerced by the District Attorney. In his affidavit he asserted that the words: “He (Sacco) is the dead image” of the bandit were put into his mouth by the District Attorney.
Six months later Pelser recanted his recantation in a statement to the District Attorney. This time he said his statement to the defense’s investigator was untrue, that his trial testimony was true, that the statement made after trial was untrue and the last statement to the District Attorney true.
In connection with the second motion the defense filed an affidavit sworn to by Roy E. Gould, an itinerant vendor of razor paste, who alleges that the bandit on the right-hand side of the fleeing car fired at him and that a bullet went through his coat. He was arrested by the police, but was released when he convinced them of his innocence. He told the officers that he would be able to identify the bandits, and gave them his name and address. The prosecution did not call Gould. Through the mention of his name in a newspaper article the defense, after laborious search through half a dozen States, found him at Portland, Me., eight months after the trial. He was confronted with the convicted men and swore that they were not the bandits he saw on the day of the shooting. Motion denied.