Sacco & Vanzetti: Armed Robbery Case, Social Justice, and Execution
On April 15th, 1920, a guard and a paymaster for the Slater and Morrill Shoe Company in Braintree Massachusetts were gunned down during an armed robbery by what eyewitnesses described as two men of Italian descent.
Who Were Sacco and Vanzetti?
The killers fled with more than $15,000 in cash—some $220,000.00 in today’s currency—and when police came up empty regarding any plausible suspects, they arrested avowed Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti when they entered a parking garage to claim a car that police believed was connected with the crime.
Standing trial following the peak years of the first Red Scare in America, anti-immigrant, anti-anarchist sentiment weighed heavily on the jury’s 1921 guilty verdict against Sacco and Vanzetti, and while both men carried guns at the time of their arrest, followed by false statements during their initial interrogation by police, neither man was found with any of the stolen money, and neither man had criminal records of any kind.
Based on recanted testimonies, conflicting ballistics reports, a pretrial statement by the jury foreman and a confession by an alleged participant in the robbery, all appeals were denied by judge Webster Thayer and later the Massachusetts Supreme Court.
Sacco and Vanzetti Spark Social Justice Protests
As Sacco and Vanzetti’s 1927 execution date drew near, the duo became the center of one of the largest social injustice outcries in modern history, igniting major protests throughout North America and Europe, not to mention Tokyo, Sydney, Melbourne, Johannesburg and Auckland.
Pressure mounted on Massachusetts lawmakers, including Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and future Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, obliging Massachusetts governor Alvan T. Fuller to appoint a three-man review commission to investigate the case.
Execution By Electric Chair
Weeks of secret deliberations followed the governor’s order, but in the end, the verdicts were upheld, leading to Sacco and Vanzetti’s execution by the electric chair on the morning of August 23rd, 1927.
In 1961, Sacco’s gun was tested yet again using modern ballistics techniques, proving without a doubt that Sacco’s gun killed the guard, while little evidence has been found to connect Vanzetti to the murders.
In 1977, 50 years after Sacco and Vanzetti’s executions, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis proclaimed that Sacco and Vanzetti had been unfairly tried, convicted and executed, stating that “any disgrace should be forever removed from their names,” making the convictions and deaths of Sacco and Vanzetti, a potential racial miscarriage of American justice.