Commonwealth v. Sacco and Vanzetti, Retried

This case was decided long ago. TrueJury retries it on the record, and asks you to vote as though the record were all you had.

On the afternoon of April 15, 1920, Frederick Parmenter, a paymaster, and Alessandro Berardelli, his guard, carried the payroll of a shoe company through South Braintree, Massachusetts. Two men shot them dead in the street. About $15,776 was taken. A car waited. It carried the killers away and was later found abandoned.

Weeks later the police arrested Nicola Sacco, a shoe worker, and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a fish peddler. Both were Italian immigrants. Both were self-described anarchists. Both were armed when taken. Both were charged with the murders.

The Commonwealth built its case on four pillars. First, eyewitnesses. Several placed one man or the other at or near the scene, or in the getaway car. The quality of those identifications varied considerably. Some witnesses had seen little and seen it fast, and cross-examination exposed shifts from what they had earlier sworn. Second, the pistol. Sacco carried a .32 Colt automatic, the type of weapon that fired the fatal round the record calls Bullet III. Captain William Proctor, for the prosecution, told the jury the fatal bullet was consistent with having been fired from that pistol, and a second prosecution expert, Charles Van Amburgh, went further. Defense experts disputed any match. The Commonwealth also showed that cartridges found on Sacco included the same obsolete makes as shells recovered at the scene; the defense answered that such stock was old, common, and proved purchase, not presence. The file presents the question as that jury received it: contested.

Third, the revolver. Vanzetti carried a revolver the Commonwealth alleged had belonged to the murdered guard. Berardelli's revolver had been left for repair before the murders; whether it ever came back to him, and whether the weapon Vanzetti carried was that revolver or simply another of a common model, was disputed. The defense called the chain guesswork.

Fourth, and to the prosecution the most damning, the lies. Both men lied when questioned after their arrest. They lied about the guns. They lied about where they had been. They lied about whom they knew. The prosecution called this consciousness of guilt and told the jury that innocent men do not invent stories. The defense answered that these were foreign radicals arrested in the season of the Palmer Raids, when anarchists were being rounded up and deported, when Andrea Salsedo, a comrade of theirs, had died in a fall from a window of the federal offices in New York while in custody, a death the defense laid at that custody's door. Men in that position lie to protect other men. The lie proves fear, not murder.

The defense offered alibis for both. Witnesses placed Sacco in Boston and Vanzetti selling fish on the coast. Most of those witnesses were Italian speakers testifying through interpreters, and the defense argued that the jury discounted their word for reasons that had nothing to do with truthfulness.

Presiding was Judge Webster Thayer, whose rulings and conduct of the trial the defense contested on the record. The record before you is the evidence as it stood at the close of trial; anything later is withheld until the vote closes.

You have the record. You do not have the verdict.

They were tried together, and this ballot follows the historical charge: one verdict on both men. A juror who finds the case proved against one but not the other must vote Not Guilty, and the tally will be read that way.

Did the Commonwealth prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti committed the South Braintree murders?

Two men died in a public street for a payroll. We are not asked to admire the Commonwealth's manners. We are asked whether these defendants did it.

Consider what the defense cannot explain away. Sacco carried a .32 Colt automatic of exactly the type that fired the fatal bullet, and the Commonwealth's experts told the jury the fatal bullet was consistent with that pistol, one of them going further. Vanzetti carried a revolver we say belonged to the dead guard. Witnesses placed both men near the crime.

And both men lied. Not once, not on one subject. They lied about the guns in their pockets, about where they had been, about whom they knew. The defense asks you to believe fear of deportation produced those lies. Fear of deportation does not require a man to lie about a pistol on his hip after a payroll murder. Guilt does. We ask you to convict.

Strip away the anarchism and ask what remains. Eyewitnesses who saw strangers for seconds from a distance, some of whom later took it back. A revolver the Commonwealth could never tie to the dead guard. And a bullet whose origin experts fought over in that very courtroom. That is not proof beyond a reasonable doubt. That is a case that needed the defendants to be foreigners.

The lies are the Commonwealth's centerpiece, so meet them squarely. In the spring of 1920 the government was seizing Italian radicals and shipping them out of the country. A comrade of these men had already died in federal custody. Two anarchists arrested with guns lied to protect their friends and themselves. That is what frightened men do.

Alibi witnesses spoke for both, and were disbelieved through interpreters. The judge's rulings tell you what courtroom this was.

Vote not guilty.