Comparison Of Nicola Sacco And Bartolomeo Vanzetti

Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were two Italian immigrants who became the center of attention for one of the most disputed cases in American History. The duration of the prosecution of Sacco and Vanzetti was constructed under the Public and Political opinions of the early 1920’s, as well as many aspects of the American society and its judicial system. These factors made a crucial impact on the conviction of the two men. After World War I, during the 1920s, American nativism and racial discrimination were widespread. Guilt or innocence was of no concern for the prosecutors, because they believed that both Sacco and Vanzetti should be put to the electric chair. As self-proclaimed anarchists, Sacco and Vanzetti opposed the “American way

Katzman brought forth multiple eye witnesses to place Sacco and Vanzetti at the scene of the crime. The evidence offered by the Commonwealth was not the same against both defendants, and the theory of the prosecution was that Sacco did the actual shooting while Vanzetti sat in the car as one of the collaborators in a conspiracy to murder (The Atlantic). While prosecution witnesses identified Sacco as one of the two gunmen, no witness claimed to have seen Vanzetti during the actual shooting (S&vaccount). Amounting bodies of evidence seemed to indicate that the two men were innocent. Reasonable people came to suspect that those against radicals were conspiring to destroy two people who seemed as a threat to American social order (ATF 276). The truth of that statement was supported by an official of the Italian consulate in Boston who deposed that Sacco visited his consulate at an hour that made it impossible for him to have been one of the Braintree murder gang. The claim of Vanzetti, he was pursuing his trade as fish peddler was sustained by a number of witnesses who had been his customers that day (The Atlantic). In the Sacco and Vanzetti case, each of the identifying witnesses were speaking from observations of men they had never seen before, and men of a foreign race (The Atlantic). Racial prejudice is present here. Within the testimonies of these witnesses, they saw Italian immigrants. They believe

I believe that the Sacco and Vanzetti case has remained a national story for so long because of evident racial injustice, and the effect of public opinion within our judicial system. The jury which convicted Sacco and Vanzetti, much like the trial of Andre Thomas, was an all white jury. The members of the jury, district attorney Frederick Katzman, and the judge Thayer intended for nothing besides putting both men to death, and only based their prosecution primarily on “consciousness of guilt”(ATF 262). The law attempts to limit the flow of evidence in a trial to what can be constructed as facts(ATF 264). However, in this instance, both men were denied the protection of the law and were prosecuted under their immigrant background and anarchistic beliefs. Prosecutors were more concerned with who the defendants were and what they believed than which they might have done (ATF