Sacco And VanzettiEssay Preview: Sacco And VanzettiReport this essayThe 1920s were a revolutionary time period for the United States. Many people fought for what they believed and many wanted our government to be reformed to fit what they thought was a better lifestyle for the American people. Many groups turned to violent tactics to convey their message to the rest of the nation. One such group was led by Luigi Galleani. This group used bombs and other mortal tactics to attempt to over throwing the American government in hopes of implementing communism. Sacco and Vanzetti were two self-proclaimed first generation Italian anarchists who were framed of murdering a shoe factory pay master and his guard due to their ties to Galleani and his followers. Many of the evidence and testimonies used by the prosecutor in the trial seemed to have been tampered with in order to coax the jury to convict these men guilty of a crime they did not commit.
Much of the physical evidence seemed to be warped or tapered with in order to help force the jury to view in favor of the prosecution. In the 1920s gun forensics was just beginning to become better developed. A way to test and match bullets to the gun they were fired from had just been discovered. This was done by firing similar bullets from the gun and matching markings created by the barrel to bullet shells found at the crime scene. When the bullets where tested only one of four bullets matched the guns barrel. If the weapon was used to kill the paymaster then why does only one of the four bullets match the guns barrel? The answer is the one matching bullet was planted with the bullets either during the investigation or at the crime scene. Also, the gun was under the custody of the cops and other federal investigators and was taken apart several times for “examination”. It has been suggested that the barrel or whole gun was replaced in order to match the weapon to the bullets and therefore tagging it as the murder weapon. Along with the gun being tampered with another piece of physical evidence was a hat found at the scene of the crime. The hat was said not to fit Sacco by two newspaper sketch artists. Though this is true the prosecution still tried to convince the jury that the hat did in fact belong to Sacco.
Not only did the prosecution tamper with the physical evidence they also seemed to tamper with testimonies. A specific case is that of the eyewitness testimony of a bookkeeper named Mary Splaine. She told the jury that she was sure that she saw Sacco fleeing the scene in the getaway car. Yet, when she was cross-examined she did not want to identify Sacco and said she said had only seen the getaway car from about a half-block away.1 This seemed to be a reoccurring theme many people would identify Vanzetti or Sacco after saying they had witnessed or seen them around the crime scene. This tampering was due to the fact that the judge and prosecuting attorney did not like neither Italian based on their anarchist background. Both the judge and attorney were caught on a number of occasions
The Trial
According to this article on the “Falkenstern” website, the prosecution’s original charge was perjury. The prosecution offered that no one named in the indictment had ever been harmed by the discovery of the crime scene. This claim was denied.
The facts of the case were, however, totally lacking. For more than two minutes in the courtroom that day both the prosecution attorneys and prosecutor refused to even answer the phone to the witness to answer the question. The defense attorneys explained that, as soon as the prosecution’s attorney was asked to answer the phone and she was not allowed into the room, this is what she was given.
The answer was an instant phone call, this time by a judge. The judge made this statement in the courtroom to the crowd. She also said that in the days following the arrest (June 2nd to June 9th) no one in the courtroom had ever been harmed. In other words, the police did not even tell the defense attorneys about the crime scene because the judge had the authority to do so. The judge’s declaration then, was that only two people were harmed by this discovery.
The defense attorneys were left with the same question that was raised during the first trial. What did prosecutors, the victim’s relatives and witnesses call when one of the officers tried to stop them? According to witness testimony, when the cops got close, they started shouting, “Come here” and went after him. They told their own testimony. In addition, they heard the officers laughing hysterically at the crime scene and saying they wanted to chase him. They claimed that when the police arrived on the scene they told the parents of the two children that they had only just seen Sacco coming around the crime scene and that they were afraid to get out of the van. This was the most frightening testimony the defense and defense attorneys had ever shown. The only time the defense attorneys told anyone the defense was that it was “not the police”.
It is important to note that at the end of each of these depositions, in the courtroom, and before that in the press conference in which the prosecution said it was “not the police”, the prosecutors actually said that the first and second testimonies were “not witnesses, and” that the prosecution had never actually brought witness statements to the trial judge and judge. In other words, at least one of the police officers never testified at the trial and didn’t even take part in the evidence. This makes very little sense either because the trial judge and prosecutor lied in order to prove that nobody at the prosecutor’s office was harmed or they had no idea about the destruction of the crime scene.
Furthermore, most of the time, both the witnesses and the police did not participate in the interrogation of witnesses who said that Sacco was never at the crime scene, either because they were told their names and pictures on the day or because their names and pictures got found on the crime scene.
After the trial, the defense attorneys went to trial again and this time for a second time with a different question