The trial of Sacco and Vanzetti : $b A summary of the outstanding testimonyBernheimer, Louis
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The trial of Sacco and Vanzetti : $b A summary of the outstanding testimony
Bernheimer, Louis
Sacco-Vanzetti Trial, Dedham, Mass., 1921
I. Identification of the defendants as the murderers by means of
eyewitnesses and other witnesses.
II. Identification of the defendants as the murderers by means of
“consciousness of guilt.”
III. Identification of the defendants as the murderers by means of
testimony centering on the “mortal bullet.”
The trial lasted seven weeks, and Sacco and Vanzetti were found
guilty of murder in the first degree.
_Were Sacco and Vanzetti two of the assailants of Parmenter and
Berardelli, or were they not?_
That is the issue now, as it was then.
Let us examine the testimony.
[Sidenote: 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.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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