I.
Identification through eyewitnesses and other witnesses
On the issue of the identification of the defendants as the murderers through eyewitnesses and other witnesses, ninety-five witnesses testified for the defense and fifty-nine for the Commonwealth. Of the fifty-nine, five, Mary E. Splaine, Frances Devlin, Lola Andrews, Louis Pelzer, and Carlos E. Goodridge, definitely identified Sacco as in the automobile or at the spot.
Their testimony:
As to Sacco:
1. Splaine, about three weeks[1] after the arrest, could not identify Sacco. A year later[1] she testified that he had been in the murder car, describing sixteen details of his personal appearance!
Dr. Morton Prince, professor of abnormal and dynamic psychology at Harvard University, comments on this testimony: “I do not hesitate to say that the star witness for the government testified honestly enough, no doubt, to what was psychologically impossible. Miss Splaine testified, though she had only seen Sacco at the time of the shooting, from a distance of about sixty feet, for from one and a half to three seconds, in a motor car going at an increasing rate of speed at about fifteen to eighteen miles an hour, that she saw, and at the end of a year she remembered and described, sixteen different details of his person, even to the size of his hand, length of his hair, as being between two and two and a half inches long, and the shade of his eyebrows! Such perception and memory under such conditions can be easily proved to be psychologically impossible.”
2. Devlin, a month[1] after the murders, testified: “He, (Sacco) looks very much like the man that stood up in the back seat shooting.” Q. “Do you say positively that he is the man?” A. “I don’t say positively.”[1]
At the trial, a year later,[1] she had no[1] doubt, and when asked: “Have you at any time had any doubt of your identification of this man?” replied: “No.” She explained the circumstance of an identification becoming sure after a lapse of time without additional opportunity for verification, by saying: “At the time there I had in my own mind that he was the man, but on account of the immensity of the crime, and everything, I hated to say right out and out.”
Ferguson and Pierce, from a window above Splaine and Devlin, on the next floor of the same factory, had substantially the same view as the two women. They found it impossible to make any identification.
3. Pelzer, a young shoe cutter, swore that when he heard the shooting he pulled up his window and saw the man who murdered Berardelli. In the court room, in June, 1921, a year after the crime,[1] he identified Sacco as that man. On cross-examination, Pelzer admitted that immediately after the arrest[1] he was unable to make any identification.