_Few murder cases have attracted the anxious attention of the
entire civilized world over so long a period of time as the case
of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti at Dedham, Norfolk County,
Massachusetts. These men, Italian radicals and aliens, were arrested
during the “Red Raids” carried out by the United States Department
of Justice in 1920, convicted of murder in connection with a payroll
hold-up, and on April 9th, 1927, seven years after their arrest,
sentenced to die in the electric chair._
_Agitation for the release of Sacco and Vanzetti has taken place in
every corner of the earth. Many celebrated men at home and abroad
have declared them to be innocent, their defense has fought a heroic
fight, while the machinery of the law has steadily brought them
closer to death day by day, until there now stands between them and
execution in the week of July 10th of this year, one man, Governor
Alvin T. Fuller of Massachusetts._
_Widespread ignorance on the part of the general public of the actual
testimony on which the conviction of Sacco and Vanzetti was secured
has made it advisable that a brief summary of the testimony of
outstanding importance at the trial should be made._
_The summary here offered, is based on the book by Professor Felix
Frankfurter, of the Harvard Law School, “The Case of Sacco and
Vanzetti,” itself based on the written record of the trial, published
by Little, Brown, and Company in association with the Atlantic
Monthly Company, Boston, Mass., and available at all bookstores._
_L. B._
New York,
May 15, 1927.
Seven years ago, on the afternoon of April 15, 1920, in South
Braintree, Massachusetts, Parmenter and Berardelli, a paymaster
and his guard, while carrying in two boxes the payroll of the shoe
factory of Slater and Morrill, amounting to over $15,000, from the
office building to the factory of the company, a three minute walk,
were fired upon and killed by two men. As the paymaster and guard
fell, an automobile carrying several men drew up. The bandits seized
the boxes of money, threw them into the car, jumped in, and were off.
Charged with the murder on May 5, 1920, three weeks after the crime,
Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the former an industrious
workman with a family, the latter a fish peddler, both extreme
radicals, were put on trial on May 31, 1921, at Dedham, Norfolk
County, Massachusetts. The presiding Judge was Webster Thayer, of
Worcester. Chief counsel for the Italians was Fred H. Moore, a
Westerner and a radical, later, Jeremiah and Thomas F. McAnarney, and
finally William G. Thompson, a former President of the Boston Bar
Association.
Three main lines of attack were followed by the Commonwealth in its
effort to secure a conviction, as follows:
I. Identification of the defendants as the murderers by means of
eyewitnesses and other witnesses.
II. Identification of the defendants as the murderers by means of
“consciousness of guilt.”
III. Identification of the defendants as the murderers by means of
testimony centering on the “mortal bullet.”
The trial lasted seven weeks, and Sacco and Vanzetti were found
guilty of murder in the first degree.
_Were Sacco and Vanzetti two of the assailants of Parmenter and
Berardelli, or were they not?_
That is the issue now, as it was then.
Let us examine the testimony.
[Sidenote: I.