The Sacco and Vanzetti case was a Massachusetts murder prosecution that ran from 1920 to 1927, ending with the execution of two Italian-born anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, for a payroll robbery and double killing in South Braintree. The convictions have been argued over ever since, because the trial took place at the height of the postwar Red Scare and was shaped, critics say, by the defendants’ politics and immigrant background rather than by the evidence. Fifty years after the execution, the governor of Massachusetts issued a proclamation stating that the trial had been permeated by prejudice and that any stigma should be removed from their names.
The Crime in South Braintree
On the afternoon of April 15, 1920, payroll clerk Frederick Parmenter and security guard Alessandro Berardelli were carrying two steel boxes containing $15,776.51 in cash to workers at the Slater & Morrill shoe factory in South Braintree, Massachusetts. Two armed men shot them both, grabbed the boxes, and escaped in a dark car with several accomplices. Berardelli died at the scene. Parmenter died the next day. The getaway car turned up abandoned in nearby woods, and none of the stolen money was ever recovered or traced to any suspect.1Mass.gov. Sacco and Vanzetti: Justice on Trial
Why Sacco and Vanzetti Were Arrested
The country was in the middle of a panic over foreign-born radicals. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer had launched a wave of raids in late 1919 and early 1920 targeting suspected anarchists and communists, arresting thousands, often without warrants, and deporting hundreds.2FBI. Palmer Raids Bridgewater police chief Michael Stewart suspected radicals were responsible for the Braintree crime and staked out a garage where the car of an anarchist named Mario Buda was being repaired. When four Italian men came to collect the car on the evening of May 5, 1920, police were tipped off. Sacco, a shoemaker, and Vanzetti, a fish peddler, were arrested later that night on a streetcar in Brockton.3Mass.gov. Sacco and Vanzetti: Investigation and Arrest
Sacco was carrying a .32 caliber Colt semi-automatic. Vanzetti had a loaded .38 caliber revolver. Both men lied during questioning, denying that they knew Buda or had been at the garage. Prosecutors would later call those lies “consciousness of guilt.” The defense said the lies had a different explanation: the men were anarchists in the middle of the Palmer Raids, they were carrying weapons and radical literature, and they had good reason to fear that admitting their associations would get them deported or worse.4Mass.gov. Sacco and Vanzetti: The Evidence
Vanzetti was also tried separately, before the murder trial, for an attempted holdup in Bridgewater the previous December. Judge Webster Thayer presided, the jury convicted, and Thayer sentenced Vanzetti to 12 to 15 years. Sacco was not charged in that case because his employer’s records placed him at work. Felix Frankfurter, then a Harvard law professor, later wrote that the identification evidence in the Bridgewater case “bordered on the frivolous.” By the time the murder trial began, Vanzetti walked in as a convicted felon.5Mass.gov. Sacco and Vanzetti: The Trial
What the Prosecution’s Case Rested On
The main trial opened in May 1921 in Dedham, with Judge Thayer again presiding. Prosecutors built their case on three things: physical evidence, eyewitness identifications, and the consciousness-of-guilt argument.
The central piece of physical evidence was a single bullet. Prosecutors said one of the four bullets pulled from Berardelli’s body had been fired by Sacco’s Colt. Their firearms expert, Captain William Proctor, testified that the bullet was “consistent with” having come from Sacco’s gun. What jurors did not know was that Proctor had told prosecutors before trial that he could not actually identify the bullet as coming from that weapon, and the trial phrasing was chosen to let him imply an identification without committing perjury. Proctor later signed an affidavit saying so. Judge Thayer refused to grant a new trial on that basis.6The Atlantic. The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti
Other physical evidence was thinner. Prosecutors argued the revolver found on Vanzetti had belonged to Berardelli, but never proved it. A cap said to be Sacco’s was introduced with the claim that a tear in its lining matched the nail he hung it on at work. Eyewitness accounts were inconsistent, with descriptions of the gunmen varying widely; defense witnesses placed Sacco at the Italian consulate in Boston that day and Vanzetti selling eels in Plymouth.
Why the Trial Is Considered Unfair
The fairness question turns largely on Judge Thayer. Thayer had previously presided over the trial of a man charged with advocating anarchy, and when the jury acquitted, he challenged the jurors from the bench, asking whether they had considered the defendant’s statements about being a Bolshevik who believed in overthrowing the government.5Mass.gov. Sacco and Vanzetti: The Trial During the Sacco and Vanzetti proceedings, a Dartmouth professor reported Thayer saying outside court, “Did you see what I did to those anarchist bastards the other day?” A later state review conceded that Thayer had been “indiscreet in conversation with outsiders during the trial” and called it “a grave breach of official decorum,” but concluded it had not affected the verdict.7Mass.gov. Sacco and Vanzetti: The Lowell Committee
Inside the courtroom, prosecutors questioned Sacco and Vanzetti at length about their anarchist beliefs, their opposition to the war, and their flight to Mexico in 1917 to avoid the draft. Frankfurter argued that the district attorney had exploited “the defendants’ alien blood, their imperfect knowledge of English, their unpopular social views, and their opposition to the war” to whip up “a riot of political passion and patriotic sentiment,” while the judge “connived at the process.”6The Atlantic. The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti
There was also a structural problem. On July 14, 1921, the jury convicted both men. Under Massachusetts law at the time, the trial judge alone decided motions for a new trial. Every request for reconsideration went back to Thayer, and he denied all of them.1Mass.gov. Sacco and Vanzetti: Justice on Trial
The Madeiros Confession
On November 18, 1925, a convicted murderer named Celestino Madeiros, held in the same prison as Sacco, sent him a note: “I hear by confess to being in the South Braintree shoe company crime and Sacco and Vanzetti was not in said crime.”8Mass.gov. Sacco and Vanzetti: The Madeiros Confession and Felix Frankfurter Defense lawyers tied Madeiros to the Morelli gang, a group of Italian-born criminals in Providence, Rhode Island. The Morellis had been stealing shipments from the same shoe companies involved in the crime, needed cash for a pending federal case, and Joe Morelli owned a .32 Colt consistent with the murder weapon. Madeiros said he had received $2,800 as his share.9Famous Trials. Evidence and Conclusions Concerning the Madeiros Confession
The confession had holes. Madeiros described the payroll money as being in a black bag rather than metal boxes, got the timing wrong, and refused to name his associates. Thayer denied the motion for a new trial in a 25,000-word opinion that Frankfurter called “a farrago of misquotations, misrepresentations, suppressions, and mutilations.”8Mass.gov. Sacco and Vanzetti: The Madeiros Confession and Felix Frankfurter
The Lowell Committee and the Execution
By 1927, protests over the case had spread to London, Paris, Berlin, Milan, and cities across South America. Governor Alvan T. Fuller appointed a three-person advisory committee to review the proceedings: Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell, MIT president Samuel W. Stratton, and retired judge Robert A. Grant. The committee concluded that the trial had been fair and that Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. It acknowledged Thayer’s out-of-court remarks but dismissed their significance.7Mass.gov. Sacco and Vanzetti: The Lowell Committee
Later motions and last-minute petitions for clemency or federal intervention were all denied. On August 23, 1927, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were executed in the electric chair at Charlestown State Prison. Both maintained their innocence.1Mass.gov. Sacco and Vanzetti: Justice on Trial
The Ballistics Question That Never Went Away
Whether the fatal bullet actually came from Sacco’s pistol has never been settled. In 1961, firearms experts hired by writer Francis Russell reexamined the evidence using modern comparison microscopes and concluded the recovered bullet matched test bullets fired from Sacco’s Colt. Critics attacked the test immediately, arguing that two preliminary shots fired through the gun to clear rust from the barrel had altered its characteristics enough to make the comparison meaningless. Even a genuine match would not prove Sacco fired the fatal shot, since police held the weapon for over a year before trial. The physical evidence remains disputed on roughly the same terms it was in 1921.
What Changed Because of the Case
The procedural trap that forced Sacco and Vanzetti to ask the same judge who had presided over their trial to recognize its flaws was eventually reformed, and appellate review in Massachusetts was expanded so defendants no longer depended on a single judge’s willingness to second-guess himself.1Mass.gov. Sacco and Vanzetti: Justice on Trial
On July 19, 1977, fifty years after the execution, Governor Michael Dukakis issued a proclamation declaring August 23, 1977, “Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti Memorial Day.” The proclamation stopped short of declaring the men innocent. It said instead that “the atmosphere of their trial and appeals was permeated by prejudice against foreigners and hostility toward unorthodox political views,” and that “the conduct of many of the officials involved in the case shed serious doubt on their willingness and ability to conduct the prosecution and trial fairly and impartially.” Dukakis declared that “any stigma and disgrace should be forever removed” from their names, their families’ names, and the name of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.10Rosenberg Fund for Children. Proclamation by Gov. Michael S. Dukakis of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti Memorial Day
The proclamation itself split opinion. Some called it a correction long overdue. Others, including many in law enforcement, called it an insult to the justice system. That split reflects the case as a whole: nearly a century on, people looking at the same record still reach opposite conclusions about whether two men were railroaded or rightfully convicted. What is not seriously disputed is that the political climate of 1921 sat in the courtroom with them, and that a capital case demands better.