A NOTORIOUS INJUSTICE.

Shannon News, 16 August 1927, Page 4

A NOTORIOUS INJUSTICE.

SACCO-VANZETTI CASE. (By Ilenry W. Nevinson in the ‘ ‘Manchester Guardian. ’’ It is now just over seven years since a crime was committed for which two Italians, Sacco and Vanzetti, arc sentenced to be executed this month. The crime itself was simple. At 3 p.m. on April 15, 1920, two men named Parmentar and Berardelli, employed by a shoe factory in South Braintree, Massachusetts, were driving down the main street from the firm’s office to the factory with two boxes containing wages amounting to nearly £4,000, when they were shot deal by two men, who at once sprang into a car with .several other men .and were driven rapidly away, taking the pay-boxes-with them. Two days afterwards that car was found abandoned in the woods, but there were tracks of a smaller car leading away from it.

There had been a similar “hold-up” hi the neighbouring town of Bridgewater, aud the chief of police there suspected an Italian named Boda, who iiad put his car into a garage for repairs. Twenty days after the Braintree crime Boda called for his car with three other Italians. The car was . reported as not being ready, and Boda disappeared upon a motor-cycle and was not heard of again. One of the other three Italians proved that lie had been at work on the days of both crimes. The other two Italians were Sacco, who had been a steady worker in a shoe factory but had taken a day off on the day of the Braintree crime, and Vanzetti, a fish peddler in Plymouth, Mass., and his own employer. • They were arrested in a tram as they went away, and their trial began in May, 1921. On July 14 they were condemned to death.

From the first it was held by many in America that the accused had not been given a fair- trial. From the first it was asserted that the Judge, Mr. Webster Thayer, had shown himself violently prejudiced against them, and that the District Attorney, who prosecuted, had wilfully twisted the evidence from its natural meaning and even suborned at least one important witness by an arrangement before his evidence was given. Petitions were signed by men of high position in the law and public service. Appeal followed appeal. But on April 9th, the Supreme Court of Massachusetts refused to grant the final appeal for a new trial, and consequently, as I said, the two men will at last be executed, unless the Governor of Massachusetts intervenes to prohibit rhe execution. One might have thought 'hat an execution seven years after the alleged crime would be impossible ill the ground of common humanity, especially as the accused have been ii. prison all the time. But such considerations appear not to count in American law. A DRIVE AGAINST “REDS.”

l'n estimating the justice or injustice of, the trial and sentence one must recall the state of mind then prevailing. [ was in New York at the date of the murder and for some weeks afterwards. It was a time of extraordinary panic about Communism, and even* about what Americans call “Radicalism,” which we might translate “leftwing Liberalism,” or perhaps “gradual” Socialism. The Attorney General of the Department of Justice in Washington had lately instituted a violent campaign for the wholesale arrest and deportation of “Reds,” and the campaign was being carried on with brutality and lawlessness. To anyone suspected of “Radicalism” it* was a reign of terror. But Sacco and Vanzetti were, not only extreme “Radicals”; they were foreigners, and, what was worse, they were pacifists and had succeeded in avoiding the conscription drafts. The feeling of the average citizen would run violently against them, and it was in self-protection that they applied for Boda’s car in the hope of getting their Socialist or Communist literature away in it. Their political opinions, tlieir nationality, and their pacifism had nothing whatever to do with the question of their participation in the murder, but both the prosecutor and the Judge dwelt persistently upon those points, with the apparent intention of working upon the conservative, nationalist, and militarist prejudices of a well-to-do jury in a suburb of Boston. In this they were entirely successful. The foreman of the .jury, a former chief of police, when told by a friend a few days before the trial that the accused were thought to lie innocent, replied “Damn them, they ought to hang anyway. ” That appears to have been the opinion of the Judge and the prosecutor also, and that opinion seems to have been maintained to the end by the Supreme Court of Massachusetts.

The injustice of the whole case from start to finish has now been fully exposed in a small book by Professor Felix Frankfurter, of Harvard University. He is Professor of Administrattive Law in the Law Department there, and during the war was Assistant Secretary for War in Washington. His mind has been trained in law, and he is neither a Communist nor a pacifist. Tet his treatise is a conclusive condemnation of the methods by which the accused, whether guilty or innocent, wore tried and condemned to death. FILMSY EVIDENCE.

The main issue in the case was the question of identity, and Professor Frankfurter shows how wretched the evidence for the prosecution was upon that point. In the first place, the defence had 99 witnesses to disprove identity as against-59 for the prosecution. In the second place, the evidence of the eye-witnesses of the crime was hopelessly uncertain and confused, as was likely when the sight lasted only two or three seconds, under the influence of surprise and personal terror. Worst of all, to my mind, is the fact that one of the witnesses at least was called to identify one of the accused not among a lot of other men; but when the man was brought alone before her into an empty room, of course she identified him as the man she had seen.

But the evidence on this point" was so flimsy that even Judge Thayer

abandoned it. He went on to lay c-liief stress upon ' ‘ consciousness of 'guilt, ’ ’ j>y which he meant the behaviour of ihe accused after the murder. As a matter of fact, between the time of the murder and their arrest both men went about their work as usual. They did not hide. They did not abscond with the “swag” (no money was ever found upon them), and they made no attempt to escape. Who: arrested fhev thought it was on a charge of Socialism, and because they were Socialists they carried “guns” (revolvers), knowing the violently hostile feeling against Socialists at the time. It was in attempting to establish “consciousness of guilt” that the prosecution overstepped the limits of evidence and justice by raising a hostile atmosphere against the accused as being Socialists, Communists, and shirkers of military service.

But perhaps the most shameful part of the evidence against tlie accused was the prearrangement of Captain Proctor’s statement that a bullet found in one of the bodies was “consistent with” its having been tired from itacco’s pistol. Upon appeal both Captain Proctor, who was Chief of the State Police, and the District Attorney, who prosecuted, admitted that this vague answer had been arranged between them before the trial began. It is also significant that a spy was placed in a cell close to Sacco’s in the hope of entangling, him unawares, and that another prisoner named Maderios, more than five years after the murder, being in a cell near Sacco and pitying the sight of Sacco’s wife and child, wrote a confession that lie himself had been concerned in the murders, and that neither Sacco nor Vanzetti, had anything to do with them. Following up (hat confession, Professor Frankfurter goes on to.proye that the murders were almost certainly committed by a professional gang of bandits known as the Morelli Gang, of which Madeiros was a member. *

As to Judge Thayer’s prolonged defence of his judgment in refusing an appeal, Professor Frankfurter sums up with the words:—

I assert with deep regret, but without the slightest fear of disproof, that certainly in modern times Judge Thayer’s opinion stands unmatched, happily, for discrepancies between what the record discloses and what the opinion conveys .

After reading the evidence recorded in this book and the opinions forced upon the jury by the Judge and the District Attorney I consider that statement a very moderate and restrained manner of putting the conclusion of every fair-minded man. Yet, as things stand, it is upon Judge Thayer’s decision that Sacco and Vanzetti are to be executed after seven years’ imprisonment.