Sacco and Vanzetti – Murder in Massachusetts – click Film link above
 Just over eighty years ago in Boston, Massachusetts, at a little after midnight on August 22nd, 1927, twenty-one hundred volts slammed through the body of Nicola Sacco, an Italian immigrant, a shoemaker – and an anarchist. Ten minutes later his comrade, Bartolomeo Vanzetti, another Italian immigrant — a poor fish-peddler — took his place in the same electric chair to be murdered by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Both men, accused of a murder in 1920 had been held in custody for seven years after a notoriously prejudiced trial in 1921 in which the foreman of the jury – before hearing a word of testimony in the case – declared of the defendants: ‘Damn them, they ought to hang anyway’. That was just one of many travesties of justice in this case. The trial judge, outside the courtroom, called the defendants ‘anarchistic bastards’ and announced that he would ‘get them good and proper.’ Witnesses – fifteen of them – testified to having seen one or other of the defendants in places so distant from the scene of the crime that it would have been impossible for them to have committed the crimes of which they were accused. The prosecution did not call even one of these witnesses to disprove this clinching alibi evidence. Other witnesses who discredited the prosecution case were not only never called to testify – the District Attorney failed to notify the defence lawyers of the existence of these witnesses – as he was in law and conscience required so to do. Yet, the men were convicted. Their conviction was inevitable – because they were anarchists. |
