Kill Now, Talk Forever

Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were arrested on an interurban streetcar in Brockton, Massachusetts, on May 5, 1920. Both were immigrant Italians who, in time, became ultra-militant anarchists. Sacco carried a loaded .32 Colt automatic in the waistband of his trousers when he was arrested; Vanzetti carried a loaded .38 Harrington & Richardson revolver in his back pocket. Sacco had in his pocket twenty-three loose rounds that fit his Colt; Vanzetti had four shotgun shells on him. This arrest at 10:05 P. M. marked the beginning of the Sacco-Vanzetti case, America's long debate over two criminal trials.

At the first trial--held in Plymouth, Massachusetts, from June 22 to July 1, 1920-- Bartolomeo Vanzetti of North Plymouth was found guilty of assault with intent to rob and murder at Bridgewater on December 24, 1919. Vanzetti did not testify. For firing a shotgun at a payroll truck, Vanzetti was sentenced on August 16, 1920, to serve 12 to 15 years in the Charlestown State Prison.

At the second trial--a joint trial held in Dedham, Massachusetts, from May 31 to July 14, 1921--Nicola Sacco of South Stoughton and Vanzetti (now a convicted felon) were found guilty of murdering paymaster Frederick A. Parmenter and his guard Alessandro Berardelli on April 15, 1920, in South Braintree. The prosecution contended Sacco and Vanzetti and three other bandits escaped in a stolen 7-passenger Buick with the Slater & Morrill payroll of $15,776.51. After eight motions for a new trial were denied, Sacco and Vanzetti and a third convicted murderer were electrocuted in the first twenty-seven minutes of August 23, 1927.

On April 9, 1927, Judge Thayer sentenced Sacco and Vanzetti to die on July 10, a sentence which set the stage for the last feverish summer of appeals. Disturbed by the long legal battle and the issue of doubt, some of Massachusetts' most respected citizens urged Governor Alvan T. Fuller to appoint an advisory committee on the case. On June 1 he appointed three men: Robert Grant, retired probate court judge; Abbott Lawrence Lowell, President of Harvard University; and Samuel W. Stratton, President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Fuller directed his advisory committee to review both the transcript of the trial and the eight appeals of the verdict, then give him a report of their judgment on the two questions at issue: the fairness of the trial and the justness of the verdict. Fuller would grant executive clemency (commute the death sentence) or deny it (carry out the death sentence) based upon the report of his advisory committee. Fuller also had authority to pardon Sacco and Vanzetti.

On June 3, the ballistics expert, Major Calvin Goddard, brought his newly developed comparison microscope to Dedham and compared Bullet 3 and Shell W of the Dedham trial with bullets and shells test fired through Sacco's gun at Lowell on June 18, 1921. Goddard said Bullet 3 and Shell W were fired through the barrel of Sacco’s Colt.

Working independently, Fuller began his own review on April 23, and was kept tied to the case until the last hour before execution. With help from his attorney and his secretary, he interviewed eleven jurors, the trial judge, and some 100 witnesses of the South Baintree crime. He also interviewed Plymouth trial witnesses and Plymouth jurors. After he talked with John Vahey and James M. Graham--defense attorneys at Vanzetti's Plymouth trial--he concluded that Vanzetti himself had made the decision not to take the witness stand at Plymouth. This conclusion Vanzetti and some Sacco-Vanzetti scholars disputed.

If Fuller did not conduct an exhaustive review, he did interview many concerned about the fairness and justness of both the Plymouth and Dedham trials. Among these was Roy E. Gould, who, though a putative eyewitness of the South Braintree crime, had not been called to testify at Dedham. Upon request, Fuller agreed to a joint interview with Gardner Jackson and Aldino Felicani. (Jackson and Marion Denman Frankfurter published The Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1928. Felicani, on May 6, 1920, founded the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee.) Jackson, who left a reporter's job at the Boston Globe in 1926 to direct public relations for the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee, was one of many persistent visitors to Fuller's office. The pugnacious Jackson also confronted Fuller's Advisory Committee.

In July, Fuller conducted interviews both in his office and on the road. He questioned ballistics experts who had testified at Dedham, and he read legal documents submitted by William G. Thompson and Herbert B. Ehrmann--attorneys who represented Sacco and Vanzetti before Fuller's Advisory Committee. (Thompson, who had lectured at the Harvard Law School, became chief attorney for the defense on November 25, 1924, when the radical lawyer Fred H. Moore lost favor with the Saccos.) In his surprise visit to the Charlestown prison on July 22, Fuller talked with Sacco, Vanzetti, and Celestino F. Madeiros in the warden's office.

Madeiros--a convicted murderer like Sacco and Vanzetti--while waiting to be retried for his crime on November 1, 1924, in Wrentham, Massachusetts, confessed in a prison note of November18, 1925, that he and a gang from Providence, Rhode Island, committed the South Braintree crime, not Sacco and Vanzetti. This confession generated eighty-eight affidavits; and a motion for a new trial for Sacco and Vanzetti was argued before Judge Thayer from September 13 to 17, 1926. Thompson and Assistant District Attorney, Dudley P. Ranney, debated the thesis that the South Braintree crime had been committed by Madeiros and the Joe Morelli gang of Providence. Thayer denied this motion on October 22, 1926. Thompson and Ehrmann lost the appeal on denial of this sixth motion on April 5, 1927. On April 9, Sacco and Vanzetti were permitted to speak before Thayer pronounced their death sentences.