Word: pistoled
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...white man who watched hymn-singing Negroes burst from a sweltering church and growled: "We ought to shoot every damned one of them." And there was the little Negro girl, splendid in a newly starched dress, who marched out of a church, looked toward a massed line of pistol-packing cops, and called to a laggard friend: "Hurry up, Lucille. If you stay behind, you won't get arrested with our group." Finally, outlined against the flames that shot 150 ft. in the air, there was the mass of Negroes barring with their bodies and with a rain...
...managed to take refuge in the Brazilian embassy. A fifth, Colonel Charles Turnier, was picked up and dragged to Dessalines barracks for "questioning." Next morning machine guns rattled in the barracks, and there was Turnier dead on the drill ground. The official version was that Turnier somehow acquired a pistol, broke out of his cell, and was cut down as he darted toward the commanding officer's quarters...
Finally, the prosecution brought a ballistics expert who said he was "inclined to believe" that Sacco's pistol fired the bullet that killed Berardelli, and another who said that the bullet was "consistent" with having been fired through the pistol. Two defense ballistics experts testified that the bullet could not, in their opinion, have been fired by Sacco...
Captain William Proctor, a Commonwealth witness who had said at the trial that the bullet which killed Berardelli was "consistent" with having gone through Sacco's pistol, admitted after the trial that he and the district attorney had framed his answer in order to sway the jury. All he meant by "consistent" was that the bullet was fired from a 32 caliber Colt--there were some 300,000 in existence at the time. Proctor died before he could testify on the matter in court, but the affidavit he had filed was made the basis of a motion...
...question to deceive the jury, the committee says the jury "must have understood the plain English words." This is discernibly false. Not only did the judge instruct the jury that Proctor's testimony meant that "the fatal Winchester bullet . . . was fired through the barrel of the Colt Automatic pistol found upon the defendant Sacco at the time of his arrest." The newspapers of the day also failed to understand "the plain English words." "EXPERTS PICK MURDER PISTOL; Declare Bullet from Sacco's Gun Caused Death of Berardelli," read the headlines of the Boston Herald...