Word: vanzettis
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...state also tried to prove that a revolver found on Vanzetti when he was arrested was the same one that had been taken from Berardelli by one of the gunmen. Mrs. Berardelli testified that Vanzetti's gun looked like her husband's, and a ballistics expert testified that the gun had a new hammer; Berardelli had bought a new hammer for his gun shortly before the crime...
...lies Sacco and Vanzetti told on being arrested were brought out as evidence of "consciousness of guilt." The defense agreed that the men were conscious of guilt, but claimed they believed they were being arrested for their politics and not for murder. Their interrogation took place during the "Red Scare," when alien radicals were being deported and fear of "bomb-throwers" and foreigners was rampant in the East...
...defendants offered their alibis. A number of men testified that they had bought fish from Vanzetti at hours that made it impossible for him to have been in Braintree at the time of the murder; some became confused on cross-examination and made contradictory statements. The Italian consul in Boston and a number of others testified that Sacco had been in Boston getting his passport on the fifteenth, just as he had told his employer...
...basis of the evidence presented, the jury convicted both Sacco and Vanzetti. After their trial, however, the case became even more complicated. Walter R. Ripley, foreman of the jury, was found to have brought some cartridges of his own into the jury room and to have compared them with Vanzetti's, a violation of the rules of evidence. More seriously, Ripley allegedly told a friend before the trial that the "guineas" should be hanged whether they were guilty or not. A policeman testified that the foreman was known to be strongly prejudiced against Italians...
Finally, a Portuguese jailbird named Celestino Madeiros, who had just appealed his own conviction for murder, passed a note to a prison guard: "I hear by confess to being in the South Braintree shoe company crime and Sacco and Vanzetti was not in said crime...