Bedard and Weeks pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and received life sentences. Madeiros, who had done the actual shooting, always maintained that Detective Lieutenant Joseph Ferrari of the State Police had promised him a second-degree murder sentence if he confessed. Left alone to stand trial for his life, he felt double-crossed. His trial began on May 11, 1925, before Judge Henry Lummus, a waddling three-hundred-pounder with a black Van Dyke beard. Scarcely more than a formality, it lasted only a few days. The car used in the holdup, a conspicuous blue Hudson speedster, was traced to Bedard in Providence. Madeiros himself had been picked up in Providence at Zack’s Hotel, where he was found in bed with two other Portuguese floaters, Mingo and Pacheco. Under his pillow was the gun he had used at Wrentham. The most that Squires could do for his doomed client was to question his sanity. It took the jury less than an hour to decide that Madeiros was sane and to bring in a verdict of guilty. There the case would have ended with a short walk to the electric chair except for a crotchet of Judge Lummus’. The bulky judge had long wondered why it was considered necessary at the outset of any criminal trial to instruct the jury that a defendant was presumed to be innocent. Deliberately he omitted the banal phrase, and because he did so Squires appealed the verdict. It was while this appeal was pending that Madeiros had written his note to Sacco. The question was soon raised as to whether Madeiros had done this because, in his version, “I seen Sacco’s wife come up here with the kids and I felt sorry for the kids,” or whether he thought that the confession might be of help to him in his second trial. He already knew that the Defense Committee had spent a quarter of a million dollars defending Sacco and Vanzetti. According to Oliver Curtis, the deputy jail master, Miller, the trusty, had come to him one afternoon to ask if Madeiros might borrow a pamphlet from Sacco containing the committee’s financial report. Thirty or forty minutes later Miller returned it to Curtis with a scrawled note: _I hear by confess to being in the shoe company crime at south Braintree on April 15 1920 and that Sacco and Vanzetti was not there_ _Celestino F. Madeiros_ Curtis kept the note but did nothing about it. After waiting three days Madeiros sent the second note to Sacco. The Portuguese did not deny he had read the financial report but claimed he had read it after he had written the two notes, not before.