[Illustration: (Left) _Sacco tries on the cap and addresses the court. Sketches by Norman._] [Illustration: (Right) _Governor Alvan Fuller._] [Illustration: (Far right) _Edna St. Vincent Millay._] [Illustration: BOSTON HERALD ] [Illustration: (Far left) _Rosina Sacco and her children leaving Charlestown Prison, August, 1927._] [Illustration: Governor Alvan Fuller] [Illustration: (Left) _Rosina and Luigia Vanzetti visiting the death house, August 20._] [Illustration: BOSTON GLOBE _The start of the funeral procession._] In weighing the testimony of the identifying witnesses, the jurors would have to consider the latter’s intelligence, “their opportunity for observations, their reasons for making such observations, the duration of such observations, and the mental or nervous condition of the witness at the time.” Turning to the ballistics testimony, Thayer fell into the crucial error of McAnarney and Katzmann, for he, too, accepted Van Amburgh’s “I am inclined to believe” as a direct assertion that the Berardelli death bullet had come from Sacco’s automatic. “You must determine this question of fact,” he told them. In speaking of the Vanzetti revolver, he first said that it had had a new hammer and spring, then later corrected himself. The emphasis of the latter part of the charge was on the question of consciousness of guilt, to which Judge Thayer gave much more space than he did to the other testimony. “If the defendants were only consciously guilty of being slackers,” he informed the jurors, “liable to be deported, fearing punishment therefore, and were not consciously guilty of the murder of Berardelli and Parmenter, then there is no consciousness of guilt during the time they were at the Johnson house, because the defendants were solely being tried for the murder of Berardelli and Parmenter, and for nothing else.” This was a question of fact for the jurors to decide, just as it was for them to decide whether or not the defendants had “the desire and purpose and intention” of drawing their weapons when they were arrested on the streetcar. The court decided questions of law, but only the jury could decide on the facts. Alibis were always questions of fact. “Therefore,” he instructed them finally, “all testimony which tends to show that the defendants were in another place at the time the murders were committed tends also to rebut the evidence that they were present at the time and place the murders were committed. If the evidence of an alibi rebuts evidence of the Commonwealth to such an extent that it leaves reasonable doubt in your minds as to the commission of the murders charged against these defendants then you will return a verdict of not guilty. On the other hand, if you find that the defendants or either of them committed the murders and the Commonwealth has satisfied you of such fact beyond a reasonable doubt from all the evidence in these cases, you will return a verdict of guilty.”