A new book by Bruce Watson exam­ines the case of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian immi­grants whose guilt remains in seri­ous doubt eight decades after Massachusetts car­ried out their death sen­tences. The book, ​“Sacco & Vanzetti: The Men, the Murders, and the Judgment of Mankind” (Viking, 2007), pro­vides a fac­tu­al account of the case sur­round­ing the two men, who were con­vict­ed of steal­ing a shoe fac­to­ry’s pay envelopes and killing four peo­ple in the crime. Watson’s inves­ti­ga­tion found that there were as many dif­fer­ent accounts of the crime as there were peo­ple to tes­ti­fy about it, and that the state’s pros­e­cu­tion of Sacco and Vanzetti was shaped by deep prej­u­dice against Italian immigrants. 

Police focused their atten­tion on Sacco and Vanzetti after one eye­wit­ness stat­ed that two sus­pi­cious-look­ing men speak­ing Italian had been seen in the town where the crime was com­mit­ted, and that one of the men ​“bore a strik­ing resem­blance to Nicola Sacco.” Watson’s review of his­tor­i­cal doc­u­ments revealed that Sacco and Vanzetti’s tri­al lacked basic due process. The two men were forced to sit in cages dur­ing their tri­al, dur­ing which pros­e­cu­tors exploit­ed the pairs well-known activism in anar­chist cir­cles. Even tri­al judge Webster Thayer called the two ​“anar­chis­tic bas­tards” and told a friend that he ​“would get them good and prop­er.” After Sacco and Vanzetti were con­vict­ed, they strug­gled for six years to prove their inno­cence, but all attempts to vacate their con­vic­tions were denied.

Sacco and Vanzetti main­tained their inno­cence through­out their tri­al and dur­ing their years on death row. Their case was among the first to gen­er­ate wide­spread protest around the world and with­in the U.S. Thousands of sup­port­ers gath­ered in Boston and New York to protest the state’s pros­e­cu­tion of the two men and to call for a halt to their exe­cu­tions. An edi­to­r­i­al about their exe­cu­tion appear­ing in The Nation stat­ed, ​“We are shak­en to the core.… (The exe­cu­tions were) a judi­cial mur­der (that) struck at the rep­u­ta­tion of the whole nation (and) every­where strength­ened all those who believe that the world can be reformed only by bombs and blood­shed.”
(Washington Post Book World, August 19, 2007 and The Nation, August 23, 2007). See Books and Innocence.

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