Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were two Italian immigrant anarchists convicted in Massachusetts of a 1920 payroll robbery and double murder in South Braintree, sentenced to death, and executed by electric chair on August 23, 1927. Their case drew worldwide protest and became one of the most studied miscarriages of justice in American legal history. Fifty years after the executions, the governor of Massachusetts formally declared that the trial had been unfair and that any stigma should be removed from their names.1Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Sacco and Vanzetti: Who Were Sacco and Vanzetti?
Two Immigrants, One Political Cause
Nicola Sacco was born in southern Italy in 1891 and arrived in the United States in 1908. He built a steady life in Massachusetts as a skilled shoe factory worker, eventually an edge trimmer, earning a reliable wage that supported his wife and young son.1Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Sacco and Vanzetti: Who Were Sacco and Vanzetti? By most accounts, he was quiet and hardworking, and his employer and neighbors thought well of him.
Bartolomeo Vanzetti was born in 1888 in Villafalletto in northern Italy, and also emigrated in 1908. He cycled through manual labor jobs before settling in Plymouth as a fish peddler, working from a pushcart because it gave him time to read, talk politics, and engage with his community. He never married and lived modestly.
What tied them together was politics. Both men were committed anarchists who followed the teachings of Luigi Galleani, an Italian radical whose movement advocated dismantling governments and capitalist structures through direct action. They met through this circle and shared a devotion to labor rights and revolutionary politics, distributing anarchist literature and attending meetings that challenged the federal government’s treatment of workers and immigrants. When the United States entered World War I, both fled to Mexico with a group of fellow Galleanists rather than be drafted into a war they opposed on principle.1Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Sacco and Vanzetti: Who Were Sacco and Vanzetti? After the war they returned to Massachusetts and resumed their activism inside Italian immigrant communities near Boston.
The South Braintree Robbery
On the afternoon of April 15, 1920, paymaster Frederick Parmenter and security guard Alessandro Berardelli left the offices of the Slater and Morrill shoe factory in South Braintree carrying two metal boxes with $15,776.51 in cash payroll. At about 3:05 p.m., two armed men shot both of them. Berardelli and Parmenter died from their wounds. The shooters grabbed the payroll boxes, and a dark Buick raced up the street to pick them up, firing occasionally to discourage pursuit.2Mass.gov. Sacco and Vanzetti: The Crime Scene The money was never recovered.
The Arrest and What They Lied About
On the evening of May 5, 1920, Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested aboard a streetcar in Brockton, Massachusetts. They had gone with two other men to retrieve a car that police had connected to the South Braintree crime. Sacco was carrying a loaded .32-caliber Colt automatic with additional bullets, plus a flyer for a meeting where Vanzetti was scheduled to speak. Vanzetti was carrying a .38-caliber Harrington and Richardson revolver that prosecutors would later argue had belonged to the murdered guard Berardelli.
When questioned, both men lied. They denied knowing each other well, denied being anarchists, gave false accounts of where they had been, and offered implausible reasons for being armed. At trial, Vanzetti explained that he had lied because he was frightened for himself and his comrades. The country was then in the grip of what came to be called the Red Scare. In 1919 and 1920, a wave of anarchist bombings triggered a federal crackdown led by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, and thousands of suspected anarchists and communists were arrested, with hundreds deported.3Library of Congress. Introduction – Palmer Raids: Topics in Chronicling America Just two days before their arrest, a fellow Galleanist named Andrea Salsedo had fallen to his death from the fourteenth floor of a New York office building where he had been held without a lawyer by federal agents for eight weeks. Sacco and Vanzetti were reportedly trying to gather and hide radical literature when they were picked up.
The prosecution had a different reading of all that lying. It was, prosecutors argued, “consciousness of guilt,” and Judge Webster Thayer would later call it the most potent evidence against the two men.
The Dedham Trial
The murder trial opened on May 31, 1921, in the Dedham courthouse, with Superior Court Judge Webster Thayer presiding. It ran until July 14 and produced sharply disputed evidence on every major point.4Mass.gov. Sacco and Vanzetti: The Trial
Ballistics
The prosecution’s technical case turned on a single bullet, designated Bullet III, which killed Berardelli. The state’s expert testified that markings on the bullet were “consistent with” having been fired from Sacco’s Colt. That phrasing was carefully chosen. The state’s own ballistics expert, Captain William Proctor, later signed an affidavit stating that he had told the district attorney before trial he could not conclude Bullet III came from Sacco’s specific gun, and the district attorney had framed his questions to elicit only the softer “consistent with” answer, which sounded more damning to the jury than it was.5Mass.gov. Sacco and Vanzetti: Motions for a New Trial Defense experts disputed the ballistics conclusions throughout. The prosecution also introduced a dark cap found at the crime scene that they said belonged to Sacco, although witnesses noted the fit was poor.
Eyewitnesses and Alibis
Eyewitness testimony was extensive on both sides and contradictory. Several witnesses placed the defendants at or near the crime scene, but many accounts shifted between initial police interviews and trial. Judge Thayer himself later acknowledged that the verdicts “did not rest, in my judgment, upon the testimony of the eyewitnesses.”6Mass.gov. Sacco and Vanzetti: The Evidence
The defense put on alibis for both men. Sacco said he had been in Boston at the Italian consulate working on a passport application, and multiple witnesses backed him. Vanzetti’s alibi came from customers and neighbors who said they had been buying fish from him in Plymouth at the time of the crime. Many of these defense witnesses were Italian immigrants whose translated testimony appears to have carried less weight with the jury.
Prejudice in the Courtroom
The defense argued throughout that the case was driven less by the evidence than by hostility toward the defendants’ immigrant status and radical politics. Fred Moore, the lead defense attorney, was a radical labor lawyer from the West Coast who had never practiced in Massachusetts, and his outsider manner antagonized Judge Thayer.4Mass.gov. Sacco and Vanzetti: The Trial Felix Frankfurter, then a Harvard law professor and later a Supreme Court justice, published a detailed critique in 1927, writing that the atmosphere had been permeated by the “wholesale rounding up of Reds” under Palmer, that jury selection had been slanted toward “substantial” and “representative citizens” handpicked by sheriff’s deputies, and that the defendants’ broken English caused them to misunderstand questions on the stand.7The Atlantic. The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti
The jury returned guilty verdicts of first-degree murder on July 14, 1921. The conviction carried a mandatory death sentence.
Six Years of Appeals
Between 1921 and 1926, the defense filed a series of motions for a new trial, and Judge Thayer denied every one of them. One motion produced an affidavit that jury foreman Walter Ripley had said, before the trial began, “Damn them, they ought to hang anyway.”5Mass.gov. Sacco and Vanzetti: Motions for a New Trial Another exposed the ballistics maneuvering by Captain Proctor and the district attorney. Thayer denied both.
The most dramatic motion came in November 1925. A convicted murderer named Celestino Madeiros, held in the same prison as Sacco, passed him a note that read: “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.”8Mass.gov. Sacco and Vanzetti: The Madeiros Confession and Felix Frankfurter Defense investigators tied Madeiros to the Morelli gang, a group of Italian-American criminals in Providence, Rhode Island, who had been stealing from the very shoe companies whose payroll was taken. Joe Morelli was said to bear a striking resemblance to Sacco. Judge Thayer denied that motion too.
Under Massachusetts law at the time, appellate review was narrow. The Supreme Judicial Court could examine only questions of law and whether the trial judge had abused his discretion; it could not order a new trial based on the overall atmosphere of the proceedings.9Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Sacco and Vanzetti: The Aftermath The same judge who had presided at trial ruled on every motion to overturn his own verdict.
The Lowell Committee, the Executions, and the Global Reaction
As international attention grew, Massachusetts Governor Alvan Fuller appointed an advisory committee in 1927 to review the case. It consisted of Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell, MIT President Samuel Stratton, and retired probate judge Robert Grant. Their report, issued July 27, 1927, concluded the trial had been fair and the defendants guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. The committee acknowledged Judge Thayer had been “indiscreet in conversations with outsiders during the trial” and that this was “a grave breach of official decorum,” but concluded the indiscretions had not affected the jury.10Mass.gov. Sacco and Vanzetti: The Lowell Committee
The response overseas was explosive. A Paris demonstration in the Bois de Vincennes drew between 25,000 and 75,000 people. Protests turned violent in Hamburg, Berlin, and Leipzig. General strikes shut down stores, transportation, and newspapers in Montevideo and Guadalajara. Ten thousand marched in Sydney. Bombs damaged American embassies and consulates in Lisbon, Zurich, Marseilles, and Rio de Janeiro.
Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were electrocuted at Charlestown State Prison in the early hours of August 23, 1927.11Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Sacco and Vanzetti: The Executions and Funeral
Did They Do It?
The factual question of guilt has never been settled. Two things need to be separated: whether the trial was fair, and whether the men actually committed the murders.
On fairness, most historians agree the proceeding was deeply compromised. The political atmosphere, the judge’s documented bias, the manipulated ballistics testimony, and the narrow appellate process all point to a trial that fell short of basic fairness, and legal scholars have argued the convictions would not have stood under modern standards of criminal procedure.
On the underlying facts, the picture is murkier. Ballistics experts reexamined the original evidence in 1961 and again in 1983 using more advanced techniques, and both reviews confirmed that Bullet III matched Sacco’s gun. That points toward Sacco’s involvement, but says nothing about Vanzetti. Some historians propose a middle theory in which Sacco took part in the robbery and Vanzetti did not. Others point to the Madeiros confession and the Morelli connection as strong evidence that neither man was there, though inconsistencies in Madeiros’s account (including his description of the payroll as a black bag rather than metal boxes) complicate that reading. Dozens of books have been written about the case, and almost none venture a firm opinion on whether the men actually did it.
The 1977 Proclamation
On August 23, 1977, exactly fifty years after the executions, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis issued a proclamation declaring that Sacco and Vanzetti had not received a fair trial. He wrote 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 cast serious doubt on their ability to prosecute the case impartially. He declared that “any stigma and disgrace should be forever removed” from their names, from their families’ names, and from the name of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The proclamation did not declare them innocent. It declared the process unjust.
The widespread perception that the system had failed also pushed Massachusetts to broaden appellate review in capital cases, so a defendant could no longer be locked into review by the same judge whose conduct was in question.9Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Sacco and Vanzetti: The Aftermath The names Sacco and Vanzetti endure not because anyone can say with certainty what happened on Pearl Street in South Braintree, but because what happened afterward showed how badly a legal system can fail when fear overrides evidence.