[8] Four years after the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, Angelina
DeFalco appeared in the Suffolk Superior Court in Boston, accused of
the theft of fifteen hundred fifty dollars from Mrs. Giovanino Voce
on the promise of bringing about the release of the latter’s brother,
then serving a ten-year sentence in state prison. Found guilty of
grand larceny, Mrs. DeFalco received a six-month jail sentence.
She was still living in Dedham in 1961. When I telephoned her and
mentioned the Sacco-Vanzetti case, she hung up. A few weeks before
Francis Squires died in 1960, I found him unwilling to discuss the
DeFalco incident.
CHAPTER NINE
THE TRIAL: I
Judge Thayer’s voice rasped as he looked down from the bench at the
plump venireman from Brookline, the fourth in succession who had
asked to be excused because he did not believe in capital punishment.
“Do you set your opinion above the law?” the judge asked caustically.
“Have you done anything to get the law changed? Have you seen
your local representative about it?” The man did not know who his
representative was.
From the look of the odd-lot prospective jurors who were passing
through the courtroom on this first morning of the trial it seemed
as if most of the able men of Norfolk County had managed to sneak
their names off the jury list. The apologetic line filed by the
bench—fogies long past the statutory age, invalids, men who had been
deaf for years, whose wives were dying and who had certificates to
prove it, who were just about to sail for Europe, and finally the
objectionable objectors.
Of course there were the occasional better prospects, but every time
a man came along who looked educated or respectable, as if he might
be somebody, Moore seemed bound to challenge him. That was the way it
struck Jerry McAnarney. If Jerry had been going on trial for murder
he knew he would rather take his chances with a businessman than
with some fellow who dug sewers. But not Fred Moore; he wanted the
sewer-digger every time. There was a young fellow Jerry had spotted
in the line, a good clean-cut college type; as soon as Moore found
out he worked for Page & Company, that finished him. Then there was
someone McAnarney recognized from the New England Trust Company, the
sort of man any defense lawyer ought to get down on his knees to
have on a jury. He told Moore so, but Moore would not have him.
For thirty years Jerry McAnarney had been going in and out of the
Dedham courthouse, but he had never seen anything like this morning.
State troopers in khaki, some mounted, were deployed all around the
courthouse. Other troopers with motorcycles and sidecars swept up
and down the High Street, the pop of their exhausts sounding like
machine-gun fire. And inside there were police and deputies at the
doors, parading up and down the corridors, on the stairs.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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