Saturday morning the courthouse was more heavily guarded than at any time during the trial. State troopers, mounted and on motorcycles, patrolled the streets, and portly Colonel Foote, the Commissioner of Public Safety, came over from the State House in person. Plain-clothes men in all their obviousness tramped up and down the High Street. The Boston riot squad appeared, loaned for the day by the Boston police commissioner. The public was banned from the courthouse. Reporters who were admitted were patted for weapons. When Sacco and Vanzetti were brought in and their handcuffs taken off, there were fewer than fifty persons in the courtroom. Three months had done much to alter the two men. In July, overwhelmed by the verdict, they had felt isolated. Now the news from overseas had given them the satisfaction of knowing that there were workers the world over who were not going to stand by while the courts of Massachusetts sent their comrades to the electric chair. Newly confident, Sacco and Vanzetti were also full of resentment, particularly against the debonair district attorney whom they once more faced. Both Moore and Jerry McAnarney well knew there was no chance that Judge Thayer would overrule the jury’s verdict, but the motion was a legal step always taken in murder cases. The arguments and counterarguments lasted all that Saturday and the following Saturday, Moore appealing particularly to the fact that the jury had given no consideration to the alibi witnesses. While Katzmann was delivering his arguments defending the verdict, the men in the cage kept interrupting and contradicting him. When he told of taking a witness to the Dedham jail who picked out Sacco from a group of prisoners, Sacco jumped up in the cage and accused the district attorney of having prompted the witness. “Yes,” he shouted to Judge Thayer, who motioned to a deputy, “that man he said, ‘There’s Sacco.’ That’s the way he know!” The deputy grabbed Sacco by the arm. “Go easy!” Sacco cried out, trying to brush him off. Vanzetti now broke in savagely: “You bring every crook in Massachusetts to testify against us! You and every man of sense know it.” Judge Thayer observed acidly that the defendants ought not to interrupt. When they continued to shout and gesticulate, he again signaled to the deputies to quiet them. He too had been hearing of the turmoil in Europe, and had been receiving letters and telegrams daily—some of them threatening—demanding a new trial. His house in Worcester was now under guard, and he was simmeringly aware that last summer’s court session and verdict had by no means ended the case. “These cases,” he announced with controlled but still obvious anger as he looked sourly at the cage, “seem to have assumed a state, national and international interest. Overseas a statement was published that the presiding justice said to the jury that these men must be convicted because they were Italians and radicals. That statement was absolutely false.”