Sacco and Vanzetti

Some cases do not end with the verdict. Some truly begin when the judge's gavel falls, when the convicted man enters prison, when the press takes sides, when crowds take to the streets, when the State executes and, decades later, still needs to explain why that was not clean justice. The case of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti belongs to that category.

They were two Italian immigrants, labourers and anarchists, convicted of robbery and double murder committed in Massachusetts in 1920. The crime happened. Two men died. There was an investigation, a trial, appeals, protests, an alternative confession, an international campaign and an execution. But the case was not fixed in history as a simple murder conviction. It became an open wound over prejudice, political fear, immigration and the fragility of a justice system when the social climate demands guilty parties before truth.

The official Massachusetts judicial exhibition on the case summarises it in one essential sentence: experts continue to debate whether one or both participated in the robbery and murders, but there should be no debate on one point — Sacco and Vanzetti did not receive a fair trial.

That will be our starting point. We will not write that they were absolutely innocent when history still debates the evidence, the ballistics and individual responsibility. Nor will we repeat the old line that reduced them to dangerous foreigners convicted because "they must have done something." That comfortable phrase has served too many times as cover for justice washing its hands in dirty water.

Before the politics, before the marches, before the intellectuals, before the defence committees, there were two dead men. On 15 April 1920, in South Braintree, Massachusetts, Frederick Parmenter and Alessandro Berardelli were attacked during a payroll robbery. Parmenter was the paymaster. Berardelli was the guard. The attackers took over $15,000. Both men died.

It is worth keeping that in mind. If the article begins only with Sacco and Vanzetti, it leaves out the actual victims. The case became a global cause because of the possible injustice done to the accused. But the crime that opened the file had real victims. That truth must be held alongside the other. The question is not whether there was a crime. The question is whether the State convicted the right men, fairly.

To understand the case you need to enter the climate of the United States after the First World War. The Russian Revolution of 1917, labour strikes, bombings attributed to radicals, mass immigration and the fear of communism fed what became known as the First Red Scare. In that atmosphere, being an immigrant, Italian, a worker and an anarchist was not a biographical detail. It was almost a badge of suspicion.

Sacco and Vanzetti were all of those things at once. Italian. Poor. Working class. Anarchist. Politically uncomfortable. Culturally suspicious to the Anglo-Saxon majority. The perfect combination for a society already scanning for threats with its torch lit. Massachusetts Archives describes the case as one of the most infamous murder trials in American history, tainted by anti-Italian and anti-immigrant prejudice, fear of left-wing radicals, problems of judicial ethics and civil rights.

That context does not by itself prove they were innocent. But it does prove they were not tried in a clean vacuum. Courts, however much marble they are built from, do not float outside their era. They absorb ambient fear the way an old rug absorbs smoke. Everybody is then surprised by the smell.

Nicola Sacco was a shoemaker. Bartolomeo Vanzetti worked at various trades, including as a street fish seller. Both were Italian immigrants with anarchist convictions. They had met in 1917. They were not political leaders or grand conspirators from shadowy offices. They were immigrant workers with radical ideas in a country that had decided to treat radical ideas as if they were gunpowder.

Their anarchist politics was one of the elements that contaminated the trial. The prosecution had to prove a robbery and two murders. But the trial ended muddied by questions about patriotism, political conduct, draft evasion and ideological allegiance. When a court starts by judging an act and ends by judging an identity, the scales are no longer level.

Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested weeks after the crime. The investigation linked them to the robbery through testimonies, weapons, ballistics and conduct considered suspicious. Both lied initially about certain matters, partly because they feared persecution for their anarchist militancy and their connections to radical networks.

That point must be treated honestly. They were not perfect defendants. They had lied. They had weapons. They moved in a politically surveilled environment. The prosecution exploited all of that. But the defence argued that those lies came from political fear, not from guilt for the South Braintree murders. In the climate of 1920, an Italian anarchist could have reasons to fear the police even if he had not killed anyone.

The trial opened on 31 May 1921 at the Dedham courthouse, presided over by Judge Webster Thayer. The judicial setting could not be separated from the political atmosphere. Thayer had already shown a hard line against radicalism in other proceedings. The official Massachusetts account notes that in April 1920 he had presided over the trial of Segris Zakoff for anarchist advocacy and that, after the acquittal, he publicly questioned the jury for failing to give sufficient weight to police testimony about the defendant's Bolshevik ideas.

That does not automatically make Thayer the author of an unjust conviction. But it helps explain why his impartiality was questioned. The trial was not simply a criminal proceeding. It was a stage where unreliable witnesses, disputed evidence, early-stage ballistics, class prejudice, fear of anarchism and a press that already smelled dramatic material all mixed together. A fine cocktail if one is after criminal history. A disaster if one is after justice.

During the trial, the ideology of Sacco and Vanzetti occupied a disproportionate space. The prosecution could not legally convict them for being anarchists, but it could make the jury view them through that lens. The implicit question was simple and poisonous: if they were enemies of the American order, why would they not be murderers too?

That confusion between political dissent and a specific criminal act is one of the oldest poisons in justice. It means you no longer have to prove only what someone did. You only need to show who they are, what they think, where they come from. In 1921, Sacco and Vanzetti were tried for robbery and double murder. But they were also tried as foreign radicals in the middle of the anti-anarchist reaction. And at that point the process ceased to be only a trial. It began to be a message.

The jury convicted Sacco and Vanzetti. What followed was a long legal and public battle. Appeals, support committees and international pressure extended the case over years. Intellectuals, trade unionists, artists, labour organisations and foreign governments turned the case into a symbol.

For some, they were class martyrs. For others, criminals sheltered by red propaganda. For others, two men possibly guilty but convicted in a process so contaminated it demanded retrial. That last position is perhaps the legally strongest: even if one suspects them, an unjust trial is not repaired by an execution. It is repaired by guarantees. A small civilisational detail, frequently forgotten when states are in a hurry.

In 1925 a development shook the case again. Celestino F. Madeiros, imprisoned for another murder, claimed to have participated in the South Braintree crime and stated that Sacco and Vanzetti had not been involved. Mass.gov preserves the content of the message Madeiros sent to Sacco on 18 November 1925.

The defence tried to use that confession to obtain a new trial. But Madeiros refused to fully identify his supposed accomplices or provide all the necessary details. The attempt failed. The Madeiros confession did not resolve the case. But it added another layer of doubt. And in a capital case, doubt should weigh like iron. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court refused the new trial.

Felix Frankfurter, Harvard Law professor and future Justice of the United States Supreme Court, published a forceful critique of the trial and argued for a new hearing. His intervention mattered because it moved the issue beyond anarchist or union militancy. It was no longer just "radicals defending radicals." It was a serious legal debate about evidence, procedure and guarantees.

That was far more uncomfortable. Because when criticism comes only from your own side, power labels it and files it away. When it arrives from respected jurists and universities, the file starts to crack. The case became a national question: can a democracy execute two men after a trial that so many voices consider tainted? Massachusetts answered yes. History has not finished arguing with the answer.

On 9 April 1927, Judge Thayer sentenced Sacco and Vanzetti to death by electric chair. Governor Alvan T. Fuller postponed the execution through the summer. That same day, Vanzetti delivered a statement insisting on his innocence and linking his suffering to his identity as a radical and an Italian. Radical. Italian. Immigrant. Worker. Anarchist. In a society consumed by fear of the internal enemy, those words carried almost the weight of evidence.

Shortly before the execution, Vanzetti wrote a letter to Sacco's son Dante, a child. He did not confess the crime. With the calm of someone who has nothing left to lose, he explained that dying for a cause one believes in has meaning. That letter has been cited as one of the most humanly moving documents the case produced, beyond politics and beyond the file.

By 1927 the case was international. Writers, artists, anarchists, communists, socialists, trade unionists and Italians around the world rallied in support. There were protests in the United States and in multiple countries. The cause crossed borders because it touched universal nerves: immigration, class, political repression, capital punishment, judicial bias.

Sacco and Vanzetti were executed at Charlestown State Prison on 23 August 1927. That same night, Madeiros was also executed for an unrelated murder. The execution did not close the case. It froze it. From that moment there could be no useful new trial, no lived acquittal. Only memory, revision, books, songs, films, archives and arguments.

The electric chair turned Sacco and Vanzetti into a symbol. That does not mean they were saints. It means the State turned a disputed cause into an irreversible death. And when justice acts irreversibly on a persistent doubt, it does not end the conflict. It makes it hereditary.

The cultural impact of the case was enormous and lasting. Mass.gov notes that from the 1920s to the present it has inspired multiple artistic and literary works. In 1971 director Giuliano Montaldo made the film Sacco e Vanzetti, with music by Ennio Morricone. The song Joan Baez recorded for that film, composed by Morricone, became one of the most widely recognised pieces in the twentieth-century political musical repertoire. Decades after the trial, a melody was still carrying the names of two Italian immigrants to listeners who had not been born when they were executed.

This confirms that the Sacco and Vanzetti case is not a simple archived criminal proceeding. It is a modern judicial myth. And like all myths, it requires vigilance. If they are turned into perfect martyrs, complexity is lost. If they are reduced to dangerous radicals, the original prejudice is repeated. Serious historical work must walk between those two traps.

Fifty years after the execution, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis issued a proclamation declaring 23 August 1977 as Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti Memorial Day. The proclamation acknowledged that the trial had been tainted by prejudice and that any stigma or shame should be removed from their names and their families.

This must be stated precisely: there was no judicial acquittal of the crime. What took place was a symbolic reparation and official acknowledgement of the injustice of the proceedings. That distinction is crucial. Massachusetts did not say they had not killed anyone. It said the trial had not been fair. Those are two different things and both matter.

Justice, when it gets things wrong with the living, tends to apologise to the dead. A very elegant system, if one does not think too hard about it.

The Sacco and Vanzetti case has a central difficulty: the debate about their guilt has not disappeared. Some subsequent studies have argued that Sacco may have been connected to the crime. Others have maintained the innocence of both. Others have separated the positions of each man. The most solid consensus is not on absolute innocence but on the injustice of the process.

Mass.gov puts it exemplarily: experts continue to debate whether one or both participated, but there should be no debate that they did not receive a fair trial. Criminal Epochs does not need to manufacture martyrs. It needs to read files. And this file says something terrible: a system can be uncertain, contaminated by prejudice, receive an alternative confession, generate international protest, and still execute.

Sacco and Vanzetti matter because their story does not belong only to 1920 or 1927. It matters every time a society links immigration with threat. Every time a political ideology is used to intensify criminal suspicion. Every time collective fear enters a courtroom dressed as common sense. Every time a conviction rests as much on who the accused is as on what can be proved they did. Every time capital punishment turns possible errors into irreparable damage.

This case does not force a choice between two easy versions. It forces a more serious question: what degree of certainty does a justice system need before it takes a life? If the answer is not "as much as possible," then what is being defended is not justice. It is the administration of punishment.

In South Braintree, Frederick Parmenter and Alessandro Berardelli died. Their deaths opened a file that became a global symbol. Their place in the story must be maintained — not as a narrative excuse, but as what they were: the victims of the crime that started everything that followed.

Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti died in the electric chair on 23 August 1927. They had been convicted in a trial that Massachusetts, fifty years later, acknowledged as unjust. The evidence was disputed. The judge was questioned. The defence sought new trials. Madeiros confessed an alternative version. Intellectuals and workers protested. Half the world watched Massachusetts.

The State executed them anyway.

In South Braintree, two men died. In Charlestown, two more. And between those two facts there remained a doubt that has still not finished dying.