Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were two Italian immigrant anarchists convicted of a 1920 payroll robbery and double murder in South Braintree, Massachusetts, and executed in the electric chair on August 23, 1927. Their case drew worldwide protests, split American opinion for decades, and ended with a Massachusetts governor formally declaring, fifty years later, that the trial had not been fair.1Mass.gov. Sacco and Vanzetti: Proclamation
Who They Were
Both men arrived in the United States in 1908 as young immigrants from Italy.2Mass.gov. Who Were Sacco and Vanzetti Sacco settled into steady work as a skilled shoemaker and raised a family. Vanzetti moved from job to job and eventually made his living as a self-employed fish peddler, developing a reputation among fellow workers as a serious reader and thinker.
They were also committed anarchists. Both believed in the abolition of government and organized religion, attended meetings where social revolution was discussed openly, and took part in labor organizing. During World War I they fled to Mexico to avoid the draft. These political commitments placed them under federal surveillance long before anyone connected them to a crime, and they defined how prosecutors, jurors, and the press would eventually see them.
The Braintree Robbery
On the afternoon of April 15, 1920, paymaster Frederick Parmenter and security guard Alessandro Berardelli left the executive office of the Slater and Morrill Shoe Company in South Braintree, Massachusetts, carrying a cash payroll of $15,776.51. As they walked the roughly 200 yards toward the main factory, two men who had been loitering on Pearl Street attacked them. Berardelli was shot four times and Parmenter twice.3Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Sacco and Vanzetti: The Crime Scene
A car with three more men pulled up. The gunmen grabbed the payroll boxes, jumped in, and the vehicle sped away, leaving shell casings from different firearms on the ground. Berardelli died within minutes. Parmenter was taken to Quincy Hospital and died the next morning. The daylight killings set off an intense investigation that focused on the stolen car and on suspects linked to radical groups or earlier local crimes.
The Arrest and the Lies That Followed
On the evening of May 5, 1920, Sacco and Vanzetti went with several associates to a garage in West Bridgewater where a friend, Mario Buda, had left his car for repairs. Police already suspected Buda’s involvement in the Braintree robbery and believed his car had been used as a getaway vehicle. The garage was locked, and when the men visited the owner’s house, the owner’s wife called the police. Sacco and Vanzetti left the group and boarded a streetcar toward Brockton, where officers stopped them and arrested them as suspicious characters.
Sacco had a loaded .32-caliber Colt automatic pistol on him. Vanzetti had a loaded revolver. Both were carrying anarchist literature. When questioned by police and District Attorney Frederick Katzmann, they lied about where they had been, whom they knew, and why they were armed. Both later testified that they lied because the country was in the middle of the Red Scare and they feared that admitting to radical beliefs, or naming anarchist friends, would lead to deportation. The prosecution would build much of its case around those lies.
The Trial and Conviction
The trial for the Braintree murders opened on May 31, 1921, in the Dedham courthouse, with Judge Webster Thayer presiding and District Attorney Katzmann leading the prosecution.4Mass.gov. Sacco and Vanzetti: The Trial Vanzetti was already a convicted felon by then: he had been tried separately and convicted for an attempted payroll robbery in Bridgewater in December 1919 and sentenced by Judge Thayer to 12 to 15 years. That prior conviction shadowed the murder trial before testimony began.
The prosecution rested on three things. First, ballistics: a single bullet recovered from Berardelli’s body had been fired from a Colt automatic, and Sacco had been carrying a Colt automatic when arrested. A prosecution expert testified that the bullet was “consistent with being fired from that pistol.” Defense experts disputed the conclusion, and the reliability of 1920s firearms analysis became a running fight throughout the trial. Second, eyewitness testimony, which was inconsistent on both sides, with witnesses contradicting each other on basic details of the shooters’ appearance. Third, what Katzmann called “consciousness of guilt”: the lies the men told when arrested, their denials of knowing Buda, and their implausible explanations for being armed.
The atmosphere was thick with the Red Scare. Katzmann pressed the defendants on their anarchist beliefs and their decision to flee to Mexico during the war, painting them as unpatriotic and dangerous. The jury returned a verdict of first-degree murder against both men. Under Massachusetts law at the time, the conviction carried a mandatory death sentence.
Seven Years of Failed Appeals
From 1921 through 1926, the defense filed motion after motion for a new trial, citing new evidence and judicial prejudice.5Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Sacco and Vanzetti: Motions for a New Trial Under Massachusetts appellate rules of the era, the same trial judge decided those motions. Judge Thayer, whose alleged bias was itself one of the defense’s arguments, denied every one.
The most striking development came on November 18, 1925, when Celestino Madeiros, a convicted criminal held in the same prison as Sacco, passed him a note that read: “I hear by confess to being in the South Braintree shoe company crime and Sacco and Vanzetti was not in said crime.”6Mass.gov. Sacco and Vanzetti: The Madeiros Confession and Felix Frankfurter Madeiros would not identify his accomplices, but defense lawyers concluded his account matched the Morelli gang, a group of Italian robbers known to police in Providence and New Bedford.
Felix Frankfurter, then a Harvard Law School professor and later a United States Supreme Court justice, published a detailed analysis arguing that “every reasonable probability points toward the Morelli gang.” He noted that the Morelli members were American-born and could have spoken the clear English several witnesses attributed to the robbers, while Sacco and Vanzetti spoke with heavy accents. Judge Thayer rejected the Madeiros motion for a new trial, as he had rejected the others.
The Lowell Committee and Global Protests
As pressure mounted, Massachusetts Governor Alvan Fuller appointed an advisory committee to review the fairness of the trial. It was chaired by A. Lawrence Lowell, president of Harvard University. The Lowell Committee upheld the verdict and sentence, concluding that the trial had been properly conducted. Critics read the finding as the establishment protecting itself.
By that point the case had gone global. Around 18,000 workers filled Madison Square Garden in New York demanding clemency. Demonstrations broke out in front of American embassies in Paris, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Lisbon, and other capitals. Labor unions, civil rights groups, and intellectuals treated the case as political persecution disguised as criminal justice: two men, they argued, being sent to the chair not for what they had done but for who they were. The pressure did not change the outcome.
The Execution
Sacco and Vanzetti were electrocuted at Charlestown State Prison on August 23, 1927, after every remaining appeal and clemency request had been exhausted.7Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Sacco and Vanzetti: The Executions and Funeral In his final statement, Vanzetti told the witnesses: “I am not only innocent of all these things, not only have I never committed a real crime in my life… but I have struggled all my life to eliminate crimes.” Sacco spoke more briefly, calling the court the cruelest he had ever heard of in history. Outside the prison walls, supporters held a vigil watched by police.
The 1977 Proclamation
Exactly fifty years later, on August 23, 1977, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis issued a proclamation declaring the date “Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti Memorial Day.”1Mass.gov. Sacco and Vanzetti: Proclamation After a formal review, Dukakis concluded that the two men had not received a fair trial.
The proclamation stated 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 officials involved “shed serious doubt on their willingness and ability to conduct the prosecution and trial fairly and impartially.” Dukakis noted that the limited appellate review available at the time had prevented any court from ordering a new trial based on the overall prejudicial effect of the proceedings. He declared that “any stigma and disgrace should be forever removed” from the names of Sacco and Vanzetti, their families, and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
The proclamation did not pronounce them innocent. It said the process that convicted them was broken. That is a meaningful distinction.
Did They Do It?
Whether Sacco and Vanzetti actually committed the Braintree robbery has never been settled. In 1961, independent ballistics tests using Sacco’s Colt automatic produced results strongly suggesting that the fatal bullet recovered from Berardelli’s body had been fired from Sacco’s gun. A further examination in 1983, directed by forensic scientist Henry Lee, found that unfired cartridges in Sacco’s possession at the time of his arrest had been manufactured on the same machine as spent casings recovered from the crime scene.
Some historians have concluded that Sacco was likely involved and Vanzetti was not. Others argue both men were framed and the Morelli gang was responsible. Others hold that the forensic evidence, however suggestive, cannot rehabilitate a trial this tainted. The case resists a clean resolution because the question of guilt and the question of fairness point in different directions. A trial can be a travesty of justice and one or both defendants can still have been involved in the crime. Both things can be true, and in this case they may be.