SACCO-VANZETTI CASE, THE, a murder trial in Massachusetts, extending over seven years, 192o-27, and resulting in the execution of the defendants, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. The trial resulted from the murder in South Braintree, Mass., on April 15, 1920, of F. A. Parmenter, paymaster of a shoe factory, and Alessandro Berardelli, the guard accompanying him, in order to secure the pay roll they were carrying. On May 5 Sacco and Vanzetti, two Italians who had immigrated to the United States in 1908, one a shoe worker and the other a fish pedlar, were arrested for the crime. On May 35, 1921, they were brought to trial before Judge Webster Thayer of the Massachu setts superior court and, on July 14, were both guilty by verdict of the jury. The verdict was disputed by and other Radicals on the ground that the men had not received a fair trial because of their Radical affiliations. Motion for a new trial, on grounds that the identification was not complete, failed. Fur ther motions for a new trial were made from time to time but also failed on grounds that the evidence submitted did not justify it. On Nov. 18, 1925, the confession of Celestino Madeiros that he had participated in the crime, and that neither Sacco nor Van zetti was present, added a new complication. Motion for a re trial on the basis of this confession was also denied by Judge Thayer who claimed that Madeiros, already sentenced to execu tion for another crime, was motivated in assuming the guilt in the hope that the giving of testimony would delay his own death. A motion of appeal to the State supreme court failed, the court taking the position that the trial judge had the final power to determine the matter of retrial on grounds of additional evidence.
On April 9, 1927, Judge Thayer sentenced the two defendants to the electric chair.
It was at this point that the storm of protest broke loose. Newspapers in both Europe and America gave large amounts of space to the proceedings, mass meetings were held, and the of ficials connected with the case were flooded with petitions mingled with threats. The defence carried the case to Governor Fuller, holder of the power of clemency, who in addition to a personal in vestigation appointed President Lowell of Harvard university, President Stratton of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Robert Grant, a former judge, to investigate the case inde pendently. On Aug. 3, Governor Fuller announced that he had found against the plea, and that his advisory committee had also come to the conclusion that a new trial was not warranted. Suc cessive stays postponed the execution while further vain appeals were made to Judge Thayer, to the supreme judicial court, and finally to members of the U.S. Supreme Court, the attorney general and the president. During the days following Governor Fuller's denial of clemency, demonstrations were made in many cities in America and abroad, bombs were set off in New York city and Philadelphia and guards were set up against other threats of violence. The two men were executed on Aug. 23, 1927, both maintaining their innocence.
See The Sacco-Vanzetti Case: a Transcript of the Record of the Trial (1928) ; F. Frankfurter, The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti (1927), and The Outlook, vol. el., pp. 1,053 ff. (1928).