The Sacco and Vanzetti case was the 1921 Massachusetts murder trial of two Italian immigrant anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who were convicted of a payroll robbery that killed two men in South Braintree and executed in 1927 after years of appeals. The convictions rested on disputed ballistics, shaky eyewitness testimony, and the defendants’ lies at the time of arrest, all delivered inside the political atmosphere of the First Red Scare. Fifty years after the executions, Governor Michael Dukakis proclaimed that the two men had not received a fair trial.
The South Braintree Robbery
At about 3:05 p.m. on April 15, 1920, paymaster Frederick Parmenter and security guard Alessandro Berardelli were walking a $15,776.51 payroll from the Slater and Morrill Shoe Company offices in South Braintree, Massachusetts, when two armed men shot them both.1Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Sacco and Vanzetti – The Crime Scene Berardelli died at the scene. Parmenter died soon after. The gunmen grabbed the payroll boxes, jumped into a dark touring car, and drove off. Witnesses put the total crew at roughly five men.
Two days later, police found the getaway car, a stolen Buick, abandoned about two miles from the home of two known anarchist associates, Mike Boda and Ferruccio Coacci. That geographic thread pulled the investigation into the anarchist underground and shaped everything that came next.
The Arrest and Why They Lied
Federal authorities in 1920 were deporting suspected anarchists, and the atmosphere toward foreign-born radicals was hostile. Sacco, a factory worker, and Vanzetti, a fish peddler, were followers of the Italian anarchist Luigi Galleani, whose movement advocated violent overthrow of government and capitalist institutions.2Mass.gov. Who Were Sacco and Vanzetti
Police were watching Boda’s garage, hoping someone connected to the robbery would come for a car. On the evening of May 5, 1920, four Italian men arrived to pick up Boda’s vehicle. The garage owner’s wife called the police. Two of the four, Sacco and Vanzetti, were arrested shortly afterward on a streetcar in Brockton. Sacco was carrying a loaded .32 caliber Colt automatic. Vanzetti had a loaded .38 caliber Harrington and Richardson revolver.3Mass.gov. Sacco and Vanzetti – Investigation and Arrest
At the station, both men lied repeatedly. They denied knowing Boda. They denied visiting the garage. Prosecutors would later argue these lies showed “consciousness of guilt” about the robbery. The defense answer was different. The day before the arrest, Sacco and Vanzetti had learned that a fellow anarchist, Andrea Salsedo, had died in federal custody, and many in their circle believed he had been coerced into giving up names. They had gone to Boda’s garage to retrieve his car so they could gather and destroy anarchist literature before authorities came looking.3Mass.gov. Sacco and Vanzetti – Investigation and Arrest They lied, on that account, because they thought they had been picked up as radicals, not as robbery suspects. Whether the jury weighed that distinction is a separate question.
The Evidence at Trial
A Norfolk County grand jury indicted both men on September 11, 1920. The trial began in the Dedham courthouse on May 31, 1921, with Superior Court Judge Webster Thayer presiding.4Mass.gov. Sacco and Vanzetti – The Trial The prosecution built its case on ballistics, eyewitness identifications, and the defendants’ lies at arrest.
Ballistics and the Cap
The central piece of physical evidence was a single bullet, Bullet No. III, which prosecutors said had killed Berardelli and had been fired from Sacco’s Colt. State Police Captain William Proctor testified that the bullet was “consistent with being fired” from Sacco’s gun. That wording was engineered. Proctor later signed an affidavit stating he did not actually believe Sacco’s pistol had fired the bullet and had told the district attorney so before testifying; the “consistent with” phrasing had been worked out in advance to sound like an identification without technically being one.5Mass.gov. Sacco and Vanzetti – The Evidence Defense firearms experts disputed the match.
A grey cloth cap found near Berardelli’s body was said to be Sacco’s, based on a torn lining prosecutors attributed to a nail Sacco used to hang his cap at work. Sacco tried the cap on in court. It did not fit. It was also a different size from caps found in his home. In 1927, just before the executions, former Braintree police chief Jeremiah Gallivan revealed that he himself had torn the lining while searching for identifying marks inside the cap, which destroyed the nail theory.5Mass.gov. Sacco and Vanzetti – The Evidence
Eyewitness Identifications
Seven witnesses placed Sacco in or near South Braintree on the day of the crime. None had been consistently certain. Two had earlier told a defense investigator they could not identify anyone. Two others had only glimpsed a man leaning out of a car window from more than seventy feet away. None identified Sacco until well after his arrest, and none were required to pick him from a lineup. Several witnesses closest to the shooting itself could not identify him at all.
The identification of Vanzetti was weaker still. Four witnesses placed him near the scene, but none said they had seen him during the shooting. One had initially described the getaway driver as light-haired; Vanzetti had dark hair. Defense witnesses testified that Vanzetti had been selling fish in Plymouth at the time of the robbery, and Sacco’s alibi witnesses placed him at the Italian consulate in Boston that day.
Judge Thayer and the Cross-Examination
District Attorney Frederick Katzmann’s cross-examination leaned heavily on the defendants’ anarchist beliefs, their opposition to the war, and their status as immigrants. Judge Thayer allowed the line of questioning. Critics argued it inflamed the jury’s prejudices rather than establishing facts about the robbery. The jury returned verdicts of guilty of first-degree murder for both men.
The Madeiros Confession and Denied Appeals
The defense filed a series of motions for a new trial over the following years. The most dramatic came in November 1925, when a convict named Celestino Madeiros, held in the same prison as Sacco, passed a note confessing that he and a gang of criminals had committed the South Braintree robbery and that Sacco and Vanzetti were not involved. Defense attorneys investigated and found Madeiros’s account matched the activities of the Morelli gang, a group known to police in Providence and New Bedford for stealing shipments from the same shoe factories connected to the case.6Mass.gov. Sacco and Vanzetti – The Madeiros Confession and Felix Frankfurter Joe Morelli, one of the gang, resembled Sacco and owned a .32 caliber Colt automatic.
Judge Thayer denied every motion. In March 1927, Felix Frankfurter, then a Harvard Law professor and later a Supreme Court justice, published a critique in The Atlantic arguing the prosecution had been driven by political prejudice and that the identification evidence was fundamentally unreliable.
The Lowell Committee and the Executions
Under public pressure, Governor Alvan T. Fuller appointed an advisory committee chaired by Harvard University President A. Lawrence Lowell, with MIT President Samuel W. Stratton and retired probate judge Robert A. Grant. The Lowell Committee’s report, dated July 27, 1927, concluded the trial had been fairly conducted and the men were guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. On the question of Judge Thayer, the committee acknowledged he had been “indiscreet in conversations with outsiders during the trial” but found those indiscretions had not affected his conduct on the bench or the jury’s verdict.7Mass.gov. Sacco and Vanzetti – The Lowell Committee The report cleared the way for the sentences.
On August 23, 1927, Madeiros, Sacco, and Vanzetti were executed in the electric chair at Charlestown State Prison. Madeiros, convicted of a separate murder, went first.8Mass.gov. Sacco and Vanzetti – The Executions and Funeral Sacco’s final words included “Long live anarchy” and a farewell to his wife and child. Vanzetti said: “I wish to tell you that I am innocent and that I never committed any crime but sometimes some sin. I am an innocent man. I wish to forgive some people for what they are now doing to me.” The executions triggered demonstrations and riots in cities across Europe, South America, Asia, and the United States.
What Happened After
On August 23, 1977, the fiftieth anniversary of the executions, Governor Michael Dukakis issued a proclamation declaring the date Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti Memorial Day. After reviewing the case, Dukakis concluded the men had not received a fair trial and called on the people of Massachusetts “to reflect upon these tragic events, and draw from their historic lessons the resolve to prevent the forces of intolerance, fear, and hatred from ever again uniting to overcome the rationality, wisdom, and fairness to which our legal system aspires.”9Mass.gov. Sacco and Vanzetti – Proclamation The proclamation did not declare innocence. It declared that the process had failed.
The case also changed Massachusetts law. Before Sacco and Vanzetti, the state’s Supreme Judicial Court could review only “questions of law” in capital cases and could ask whether the trial judge had abused discretion in denying a motion for a new trial. The court had no power to reweigh the evidence itself. The perception that this limited review had allowed a miscarriage of justice led to a new statute in 1939. Under that law, the Supreme Judicial Court must review both the law and the evidence for any defendant convicted of first-degree murder, and it may order a new trial or reduce the verdict “if satisfied that the verdict was against the law or the weight of the evidence, or because of newly discovered evidence, or for any other reason that justice may require.”10Mass.gov. Sacco and Vanzetti – The Aftermath
The ballistics question was revisited in 1961, when a test at the Massachusetts State Police laboratory suggested that Sacco’s Colt had fired Bullet No. III. That finding pointed toward Sacco but said nothing about Vanzetti, whose connection to the actual shooting was always the weaker half of the case. Whether one, both, or neither man was guilty remains debated. What is not debated is that the trial itself was compromised by the political atmosphere in which it was held.