After the lunch recess the jury resumed deliberation. At 4:18 it
brought in its verdict, finding Vanzetti guilty of assault with
intent to rob and guilty on three counts of assault with intent to
murder. As the foreman pronounced the word “guilty,” a protesting
wail broke out from the thickset peasant women in the back of the
courtroom. Vanzetti remained calm. “_Coraggio!_” he called out to
them as he was led away.
The echo of Vanzetti’s voice subsided into the dusty calm of legal
decorum. Vanzetti’s friends moved toward the exits, looking back
now and then at the men filing out of the jury box. Judge Thayer,
after Vahey and Graham had stepped forward to consult with him,
extended the time for filing exceptions to August 18 and set bail at
twenty-five thousand dollars.
Several days later Juror Sullivan happened to run into Judge Thayer
in a Brockton store and mention that he and a couple of others had
taken away some of the buckshot. Judge Thayer ordered him to see
that all of it was at once returned to the district attorney. The
chastened Sullivan brought the pellets back, and Katzmann warned him
not to say anything more about the matter.
On August 16 Vahey filed a bill of exceptions in which he requested
that the shotgun-shell evidence and the testimony of Simon and Ruth
Johnson be excluded. The exceptions were not allowed, and Vahey
did not carry the matter further. On that same morning, in the
almost-deserted courtroom, Vanzetti appeared for sentencing. He stood
in the dock, an alien, slightly bent figure, flanked by his guards,
with high forehead and high cheekbones and flowing mustache. The heat
of the day had not yet set in, and the oval windows were open. If the
prisoner had glanced to his left he could have looked down Brewster
Street to the blue line of Plymouth Harbor. Instead, he stared ahead
at Judge Thayer sitting on the dais beneath the Plymouth seal, and
the judge stared back from the mask of his withered face.
Then Judge Thayer began to pronounce sentence in his precise
dessicated voice, the phrases falling like a curtain: “The Court
having considered the offense whereof the said Bartolomeo Vanzetti
is convict does order and adjudge that the said Bartolomeo Vanzetti
suffer imprisonment for a term of not less than twelve years nor
more than fifteen years, one day thereof solitary imprisonment and
the residue of said term confinement to hard labor, in and within
the limits of our State Prison situate in Boston in our County of
Suffolk.”
FOOTNOTES:
[4] The preliminary hearing on his participation in the South
Braintree murders followed on May 26 before Judge Avery in the
Quincy District Court. Sacco, against whom the evidence seemed more
substantial, had appeared in the Quincy Court on May 8.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE YEAR BETWEEN
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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