17. Sacco and Vanzetti were wrongly convicted and sentenced to death for first-degree murder due to anti-immigrant bias in the United States
Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were Italian immigrants to the United States, both arriving in America in 1908, who were jointly convicted in 1920 of the murder of a guard and a paymaster in the course of an armed robbery of the Slater and Morrill Shoe Company in Braintree, Massachusetts. Political anarchists, and believed to have been followers of Luigi Galleani, an Italian anarchist who promoted revolutionary violence, police investigations focused on an anarchist cell believed to have been financing its activities through robberies; ultimately leading investigators to Sacco and Vanzetti, the former having worked previously at the shoe company, on May 5, 1920, the pair were charged with murder.
The trial was fraught with legal anomalies, including witnesses for the prosecution admitting to having rehearsed their testimonies and the descriptions presented by key witnesses varying wildly even in relation to details such as the length and style of Vanzetti’s mustache, and was presided over by Superior Court Judge Webster Thayer; Thayer had just weeks earlier given a speech proclaiming an existential threat to the United States from anarchism and opposed the civil rights of immigrants. After just three hours of deliberations, on July 21, 1921, the jury returned a guilty verdict and the pair were sentenced to death.
Generally believed to have been an incorrect verdict fueled by political and xenophobic inclinations, the domestic and international response was considerable, with protests held on the pair’s behalf in every major city of Europe, among many more further afield, in addition to the United States, with petitioners in defense of the condemned pair including Albert Einstein and H.G. Wells; of particular note, the mine workers of Colorado went on strike in August 1927 in protest of the decision, with 1,132 out of 1,167 miners from the Walsenburg coal district participating in response to the imminent executions. However these appeals were in vain and on August 23, 1927, Sacco and Vanzetti were executed by electric chair; eventually, after decades of posthumous activism and debate, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis issued a proclamation stating that the pair had been unfairly convicted and that “any disgrace should be forever removed from their names”.