The Sacco and Vanzetti trial was the 1921 Massachusetts murder prosecution of two Italian-born anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, for a payroll robbery and double killing in South Braintree the previous year. Both men were convicted, sentenced to death, and executed in 1927 after seven years of appeals. The factual question of guilt has never been settled, but the record shows their radical politics and immigrant status weighed heavily against them in a courtroom that could not separate the crime from the men accused of it. Fifty years later, the Commonwealth itself acknowledged the proceedings had not been fair.
The Crime and the Arrests
On the afternoon of April 15, 1920, paymaster Frederick Parmenter and guard Alessandro Berardelli left the executive office of the Slater and Morrill shoe factory in South Braintree, Massachusetts, carrying metal boxes with $15,776.51 in pay envelopes.1Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Sacco and Vanzetti – The Crime Scene Two armed men ambushed them at close range, killed both, seized the payroll, and escaped in a stolen Buick with at least two accomplices. Witnesses described the gunmen as dark-complected, though accounts of specific features varied.
Police traced the getaway car to a garage near the home of known radicals. When four Italian men came to retrieve it on the evening of May 5, 1920, the garage owner’s wife called police. Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested later that night on a streetcar in Brockton. Sacco had a loaded .32-caliber Colt automatic with extra cartridges in his pocket. Vanzetti carried a loaded .38-caliber Harrington and Richardson revolver.2Massachusetts Court System. Sacco and Vanzetti – Investigation and Arrest Sacco was also carrying a flyer for an upcoming anarchist rally at which Vanzetti was scheduled to speak.3Mass.gov. Sacco and Vanzetti – Justice on Trial
The Political Climate That Followed Them Into Court
The arrests came during the First Red Scare. The end of World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution had convinced many Americans that anarchists and communists threatened national stability. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer organized nationwide raids in which local police arrested thousands of suspected radicals, and figures like Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman were deported to Russia.4FBI. Palmer Raids
Sacco and Vanzetti were not incidental radicals. They belonged to the Galleanists, followers of the Italian anarchist Luigi Galleani, whose members carried out a series of letter bombings in 1919 that killed two people and targeted politicians, judges, and business leaders. Association with Galleani’s circle made any Italian anarchist an automatic suspect in the eyes of federal and state law enforcement. Both men had also fled to Mexico in 1917 to avoid the wartime draft, a fact the prosecution would put in front of the jury.
What the Jury Heard
The trial opened on May 31, 1921, at the Norfolk County Courthouse in Dedham, before Judge Webster Thayer, and ran roughly six weeks.5Mass.gov. Sacco and Vanzetti – The Trial Three lines of evidence carried the state’s case, and each was contested.
The physical evidence centered on a bullet recovered from Berardelli’s body, designated Bullet No. III. State Police Captain William Proctor testified that the bullet was “consistent with being fired” from Sacco’s Colt.6Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Sacco and Vanzetti – The Evidence Proctor did not testify that the bullet definitely came from Sacco’s gun. Defense experts disagreed with even the softer claim, and the jury was left sorting through competing opinions on rifling marks and ammunition.
Eyewitness identification was similarly split. Some witnesses placed the defendants at the scene; others provided alibis. Sacco and Vanzetti spoke very broken English, and the transcript shows they frequently misunderstood questions from the stand. Their attorney, Fred Moore, was a California labor lawyer whose confrontational style clashed openly with Judge Thayer.
The third pillar was what the prosecution called “consciousness of guilt.” When first questioned, both men lied. Sacco denied knowing his companions from the garage, denied holding radical beliefs, and gave misleading answers about his movements. Vanzetti lied about his guns and his reason for being in the area. The state argued innocent men would not have lied. The defense answered that Italian anarchists at the height of the Palmer Raids had every reason to lie about radical associations, whether or not they had robbed anyone. A later review would find that Sacco’s falsehoods were in fact consistent with fear of deportation rather than guilt for the Braintree crimes.
Prosecutors returned repeatedly to the defendants’ anarchism and their flight from the draft, painting them as dangerous foreigners hostile to American society. On July 14, 1921, the jury convicted both men of first-degree murder.3Mass.gov. Sacco and Vanzetti – Justice on Trial Massachusetts law carried a mandatory death sentence.
The Madeiros Confession
On November 18, 1925, Celestino Madeiros, an inmate awaiting execution for another murder, passed Sacco a note: “I hear by confess to being in the South Braintree shoe company crime and Sacco and Vanzetti was not in said crime.”7Mass.gov. Sacco and Vanzetti – The Madeiros Confession and Felix Frankfurter Madeiros said he had committed the robbery with four Italians he met at a Providence bar. Defense investigators identified them as members of the Morelli gang, a criminal organization already known to federal authorities for stealing freight from the same shoe companies in the Braintree area.
The alternative theory was specific. Joe Morelli, the gang’s leader, physically resembled Sacco. The gang possessed firearms consistent with the crime-scene bullets. Its members were American-born and spoke clear English, matching what witnesses reported hearing at the robbery, while Sacco and Vanzetti spoke with heavy accents. The Morellis needed cash for legal fees on pending federal charges.
Judge Thayer, the same judge who had presided over the original trial, denied the motion for a new trial and called the confession “unreliable, untrustworthy, and untrue.” By this point, questions about Thayer’s impartiality had surfaced publicly, with reports that he had made hostile remarks about the defendants outside the courtroom. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court upheld his ruling, finding the credibility of the confession was a matter of judicial discretion.
The Lowell Committee and the Governor’s Review
By 1927 the case had become an international cause. Governor Alvan Fuller appointed a three-member advisory committee to review the evidence and the fairness of the trial, chaired by Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell and joined by MIT President Samuel Stratton and retired probate judge Robert Grant. Its report, released August 6, 1927, concluded the trial had been fair and both men were guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.8Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Sacco and Vanzetti – The Lowell Committee
Felix Frankfurter, then a Harvard Law professor, had already published a sharp critique of the case in The Atlantic earlier that year. He argued that the jury had been drawn by sheriff’s deputies from Masonic gatherings and similar groups treated as “representative citizens,” that the judge and defense counsel had a poisonous relationship that infected the proceedings, and that the defendants’ poor English had caused them to misunderstand key questions during their own testimony.
Governor Fuller conducted his own review, personally interviewing witnesses and jurors. On August 3, 1927, he announced: “I believe, with the jury, that Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty and that the trial was fair.” He denied clemency. The scope of appellate review in Massachusetts at the time did not allow a higher court to reexamine the factual findings, only whether the law had been correctly applied.
The Execution
Sacco and Vanzetti were electrocuted at Charlestown State Prison shortly after midnight on August 23, 1927.9Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Sacco and Vanzetti – The Executions and Funeral Madeiros, whose confession had been rejected, was executed the same night between the two men.
When Thayer had formally imposed sentence months earlier, both defendants addressed the court. Sacco told the judge: “I know the sentence will be between two class, the oppressed class and the rich class, and there will be always collision between one and the other.” Vanzetti spoke at greater length, insisting on his innocence and stating: “I have never stole and I have never killed and I have never spilt blood.” He attributed the conviction to the political climate, calling it “a time when there was a hysteria of resentment and hate against the people of our principle, against the foreigner.”
The 1977 Proclamation
Fifty years after the executions, on August 23, 1977, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis issued a proclamation designating the date as Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti Memorial Day. Dukakis stated he was persuaded the two men “had not received a fair trial.” The proclamation, issued in English and Italian, called on the public “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.”10Mass.gov. Sacco and Vanzetti – Proclamation
The proclamation did not declare Sacco and Vanzetti innocent. It declared that the process that convicted them was fundamentally flawed. That distinction is the one that has lasted, because the underlying factual question was never resolved. A 1961 ballistics test at the Massachusetts State Police laboratory suggested Sacco’s Colt did fire the fatal bullet, offering some support to the prosecution’s theory, but critics have challenged the chain of custody over the intervening decades, and the Morelli gang alternative has never been ruled out. Some historians have argued the two men may not have shared the same relationship to the crime, with one guilty and one not.
What the record makes clear is narrower and more damning than any verdict on guilt: the anarchism and the Italian origins of the defendants made a fair trial in 1921 Massachusetts much harder to obtain than it should have been, and the state that convicted them eventually said so.