The Sacco and Vanzetti Case: Trial, Confession, and Proclamation

The Sacco and Vanzetti case was the 1921 Massachusetts prosecution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian immigrant anarchists convicted of a 1920 payroll robbery and double murder in South Braintree and executed in 1927 after six years of appeals. The case became a global symbol of a compromised trial because the evidence was contested, the judge was documented as hostile to the defendants, and the political climate of the first Red Scare shaped nearly every stage of the proceedings. In 1977, Governor Michael Dukakis issued a proclamation stating that the two men had not received a fair trial and that “any stigma and disgrace should be forever removed from their names.”¹

The South Braintree Robbery and the Arrests

On April 15, 1920, paymaster Frederick Parmenter and security guard Alessandro Berardelli were carrying a $15,776.51 payroll from the executive office of the Slater and Morrill shoe factory in South Braintree, Massachusetts. At roughly 3:05 p.m., two armed men shot them dead on Pearl Street, seized the payroll, and escaped in a dark Buick.² Witnesses gave conflicting descriptions. Local police chief Michael Stewart suspected a link to a failed shoe-company holdup in Bridgewater the previous Christmas Eve, where witnesses had also reported Italian men escaping by car.³

On May 5, 1920, four Italian men tried to collect a car from a West Bridgewater garage. The owner’s wife, tipped off by police, warned the men that the car had no current plates. Two of the four left on foot. Later that evening, police arrested Sacco and Vanzetti on a streetcar in Brockton. Sacco was carrying a loaded .32 caliber Colt automatic pistol. Vanzetti had a loaded .38 caliber Harrington and Richardson revolver.⁴ Both men lied to police about their political beliefs and associates. They later testified that they had lied because they feared the same fate as anarchist comrades who had been arrested or deported during the Palmer Raids, not because they had committed a robbery.⁵

Both men were indicted for the South Braintree murders. Under Massachusetts law, a killing during a robbery was first-degree murder,⁶ and first-degree murder carried a mandatory death sentence.

The Evidence at Trial

The trial opened on May 31, 1921, in Dedham. Judge Webster Thayer presided. The prosecution rested on three pillars: eyewitness identifications, ballistics, and the argument that the defendants’ lies to police proved consciousness of guilt.

Eyewitnesses

Several witnesses placed the defendants near the scene or in the getaway car, but the identifications were unstable. Defense witnesses testified that prosecution eyewitness Levangie, a railroad crossing guard, had said soon after the shooting that identifying the driver would be hard, and had initially described the driver as light-haired. Vanzetti was dark-haired. Contradictions of that kind ran through the eyewitness testimony.

Ballistics

The forensic case turned on a single bullet, Bullet III, recovered from Berardelli’s body. State Police Captain William Proctor testified that in his opinion the bullet was “consistent with being fired” from Sacco’s .32 Colt. Proctor later signed an affidavit stating he had never meant to say the bullet definitely came from Sacco’s pistol, only that it was the same caliber.⁵ Two defense experts, Burns and Fitzgerald, testified that Bullet III could not have been fired from Sacco’s Colt at all.

Consciousness of Guilt

District Attorney Frederick Katzmann emphasized that Sacco had denied knowing certain associates, denied his anarchist beliefs, and given false statements about his recent activities, and that Vanzetti had lied about his guns and his reasons for being in Bridgewater.⁵ Both men testified that the Red Scare, not the robbery, drove their lies. Katzmann cross-examined them at length about their anarchist politics.

The Defense Case

Sacco testified he had spent April 15, 1920, in Boston trying to obtain a passport from the Italian consulate. A consular official recalled him because his passport photograph was unusually large and said he had discussed the photo with colleagues while looking at a wall calendar showing the date. Seven additional witnesses said they saw Sacco at Boni’s Restaurant in Boston that day. Vanzetti testified he had been selling fish in Plymouth, about twenty-five miles from South Braintree, and six witnesses corroborated him.⁵ Many alibi witnesses were Italian immigrants who testified through interpreters. Felix Frankfurter, then a Harvard Law professor, later wrote that both defendants “spoke very broken English” and that the transcript shows “how often they misunderstood the questions put to them.”⁷

On July 14, 1921, the jury convicted both men of first-degree murder.

Why the Trial Is Considered Unfair

Fred Moore, the lead defense attorney, was a California labor lawyer with socialist sympathies and no experience in Massachusetts courts. Frankfurter later described Moore as an “outsider” who had “professional nor personal sympathies” with Judge Thayer, a dynamic that may have “seriously, even if unconsciously” influenced the atmosphere of the trial.⁷

The most damaging problem was Thayer himself. The Lowell Committee, later appointed by the governor to review the case, found that Thayer had been “indiscreet in conversations with outsiders during the trial” and “ought not to have talked about the case off the bench,” calling it a “grave breach of official decorum.”⁸ The committee then concluded that these private remarks “did not affect his conduct at the trial or the opinions of the jury.”

Massachusetts appellate structure at the time made Thayer’s bias especially consequential. Motions for a new trial went back to the same trial judge. The Supreme Judicial Court could review only questions of law, not the weight of new evidence.⁹ Thayer therefore had nearly absolute discretion over whether any new development warranted reopening the case, and he denied every post-trial motion the defense filed over six years. Frankfurter attacked the “extraordinary delay” in a state where murder trials were normally “promptly dispatched.”⁷

The Madeiros Confession

On November 18, 1925, Celestino Madeiros, a convicted murderer held in the same jail as Sacco, passed a note to a jail official reading: “I hear by confess to being in the shoe company crime at south Braintree on April 15 1920 and that Sacco and Vanzetti were not there.”¹⁰

Defense investigators tied the confession to the Morelli gang, a Providence, Rhode Island crew that had been repeatedly stealing shipments from the Slater and Morrill factory and knew its operations. The gang was facing federal charges and needed money for legal fees. Joe Morelli bore what investigators described as an “undoubted resemblance” to Sacco, and the gang possessed the same types of firearms as those used in the robbery. Madeiros had come into roughly $2,800 shortly after the crime, about what his share of the payroll would have been.

Judge Thayer denied the motion. He called the Madeiros confession “unreliable, untrustworthy, and untrue.” The Supreme Judicial Court upheld him, finding no abuse of discretion as a matter of law.⁹

The Lowell Committee and the Executions

By 1927, worldwide protests had made the case impossible to ignore. Demonstrations gathered at American embassies in Paris, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Lisbon, Sofia, Montevideo, and Mexico City. Governor Alvan T. Fuller opened an executive review and appointed an advisory committee of three establishment figures: Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell, MIT President Samuel W. Stratton, and retired probate judge Robert A. Grant.⁸

The committee reported on July 27, 1927. It concluded that Sacco and Vanzetti were “guilty beyond a reasonable doubt” and that the trial had been fair. Frankfurter had already highlighted the “striking contrast” between the Dedham courtroom, set in a “quiet residential suburb” of “well-to-do Bostonians,” and the “background and antecedents of the prisoners.”⁷ Governor Fuller denied clemency. Remaining state and federal appeals were dismissed.

On August 23, 1927, Sacco and Vanzetti were electrocuted at Charlestown State Prison. Celestino Madeiros, the man who had confessed to the crime for which they were dying, was executed the same night for the unrelated murder of a bank cashier.¹¹

Modern Forensic Re-Examination

The ballistics evidence has been revisited with modern methods. In 1983, a forensic investigation led by Dr. Henry Lee found that six Peters brand cartridges taken from Sacco at his arrest “were made on the same machine” as two Peters casings recovered from the crime scene. That finding tied Sacco’s ammunition to the robbery but did not prove he pulled the trigger. The core ambiguity of Bullet III was not resolved. The original evidence has been handled repeatedly over the decades, and forensic experts remain divided on whether that bullet came from Sacco’s gun.

The 1977 Proclamation

On August 23, 1977, exactly fifty years after the executions, Governor Michael Dukakis issued a proclamation declaring the date Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti Memorial Day. After reviewing the case, Dukakis concluded that the two men had not received a fair trial and called upon 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.”¹

The proclamation did not declare the men innocent. It declared the process that convicted them tainted. That distinction still matters because historians remain divided on the underlying question of guilt. Some researchers read the evidence as pointing to Sacco’s involvement while largely exonerating Vanzetti. Others hold that both men were innocent and that the Morelli gang committed the robbery. Others accept the jury’s verdict. What is far less contested is that the trial was shaped by forces that had nothing to do with the evidence: anti-immigrant prejudice, fear of radical politics, a documented biased judge, a jury drawn in part from Masonic gatherings and men deemed “substantial” citizens, and a legal system that gave the defendants no meaningful avenue of appeal from the judge who convicted them.

1
Mass.gov. Sacco and Vanzetti: Proclamation
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Mass.gov. Sacco and Vanzetti: The Crime Scene
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Mass.gov. Sacco and Vanzetti: The Trial
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Mass.gov. Sacco and Vanzetti: Investigation and Arrest
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Mass.gov. Sacco and Vanzetti: The Evidence
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General Court of Massachusetts. Massachusetts Code Chapter 265 – Murder Defined
7
The Atlantic. The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti
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Mass.gov. Sacco and Vanzetti: The Lowell Committee
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Mass.gov. Reexamining Sacco and Vanzetti’s Trial
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Mass.gov. Sacco and Vanzetti: The Madeiros Confession and Felix Frankfurter
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Mass.gov. Sacco and Vanzetti: The Executions and Funeral