Though Moore could not shake her story he brought out that in
February Stewart and Brouillard had taken her to the Dedham jail.
There she had looked through a grating at a cell tier on a lower
level. For about ten minutes she had watched a dark muscular man
pacing up and down, the man—she finally decided—whom she had talked
with in front of the factory on the day of the murder. That man, she
was told, was Nicola Sacco.
At one o’clock Judge Thayer suspended the session for the week end.
Lola Andrews’ cross-examination would continue Monday and into
Tuesday. Moore was determined to drive her to the wall. But in
his determination he overlooked the one question that should have
occurred to any trained legal mind. Lola Andrews had been given
detailed directions to Rice & Hutchins by a man who spoke English
easily. Sacco’s command of English was so slight that he would not
have been capable of such fluent talk. His heavy accent was at times
almost incomprehensible. Yet Moore in his two days of hammering at
Lola Andrews never once brought up the question of the speech and
accent of the man who had directed her.
Judge Thayer’s weekend instructions to the jury seem, at least from
the record, judicious and temperate. “Drop this case now,” he told
them, “to be taken up Monday morning at ten o’clock. Don’t discuss
this case among yourselves. You haven’t heard all the evidence; you
haven’t heard any of the evidence of the defense. You haven’t heard
the argument; you haven’t heard the charge. Just keep your minds
open, absolutely open, fair and impartial, so that when you finally
cross the threshold of the jury room for your final determination of
this case your mind will be as impartial and as open as it is humanly
possible for any man’s mind to be.”
The trial was now beginning to look like a long one, and most of the
jurors were concerned about getting back to their families. They
talked about asking the judge to hold longer sessions. Dever was
worried that Filene’s might cancel his summer vacation after he had
been away so long. Saturday morning he had just opened a _Geographic_
when Sheriff Capen stuck his head in the door and asked if anyone
wanted to take a bath. At first they thought it was his idea of a
joke, but the sheriff marched them up to the jail and there in the
basement they found twelve bathtubs all set up and waiting. For over
an hour they soaked and splashed and tossed cakes of soap back and
forth. Dever could see a rim of dirt forming all along the edge of
his tub. The water felt great. So did the clean clothes his sister
had sent him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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