The Case Of Sacco And Vanzetti A Critical Analysis For Lawyers And Laymen

Reviews the controversial court case which resulted in the conviction of two Italian immigrants for murder. Bibliogs.

The Sacco and Vanzetti case is probably America’s most controversial court case. One of the most important studies of the case was made by Justice Felix Frankfurter when he was a professor of administrative law at Harvard. It created considerable stir when initially published in 1927. The book was praised and attacked; it was considered “thrilling,” “uncomfortable,” “lucid” and “judicious.” It was destined to become somewhat of a classic in American juridical literature. “The author... has gone through the record of the successive court proceedings, covering thousands of pages of printed matter, and on it has based this judicial résumé... he makes a survey of the case that is wonderfully compact, but complete enough to bring together all the essential developments and present them in a lucid, readable narrative.” — The New York Times “Mr. Frankfurter has very comprehensively analyzed the trial of these two condemned murderers, and a careful study compels the experienced lawyer to stand aghast at the result obtained under the absolute disregard for the rules of evidence and the conduct of a trial by a jurist who is supposed to be without prejudice or partiality.” — Edwin M. Abbott, Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology “[Felix Frankfurter’s] book on the Sacco-Vanzetti case is a real contribution to the cause of Free Speech; it is, moreover, a thriller... Every lawyer ought to read this slender but powerful volume.” — Morris L. Ernst, The Yale Law Journal “This small volume of barely more than a hundred pages should be read by lawyer and by layman. The reader will then know how the guaranties of justice and liberty may crumble under the destructive influence of class complacency.” — Charles Nagel, Harvard Law Review “Felix Frankfurter in his book mercilessly analyzes both the record of the trial and the affidavits summarizing the after-discovered evidence upon which a new trial was sought... None can read Frankfurter’s able brief without an inner conviction that the defendants are innocent.” — Charles I. Thompson, University of Pennsylvania Law Review and American Law Register “This compelling account will remain an important document in the history of what has become one of the outstanding cases in the annals of criminal justice... [Professor Frankfurter] deserves credit for the courage with which he undertook a task which in the community in which he lives was thankless and unpopular.” — Ernst Freund, Social Service Review “The whole account is set forth in a manner likely not only to capture but to hold the interest of the reader. Besides having been demonstrated, by the attacks upon it, to be reliable, it is no exaggeration to say that the book is really thrilling.” — E. W. Puttkammer, American Journal of Sociology

The Reopening of the American Mind: On Skepticism and Constitutionalism explores the connection of moderate skepticism with attachment to constitutionalism through the thought of five writers. The features of this skepticism were concisely delineated by James Madison in the 37th Federalist as a recognition of the complexity of political matters, the limitations of human reason, and the shortcomings of language. The position was first articulated by Cicero who connected it with the idea of a mixed or republican constitution developed by trial and error over generations. Cicero was influential in the world of David Hume, Edmund Burke, and Madison. The skeptical/constitutional connection found its most articulate recent advocate in Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter and underlay his advocacy of judicial restraint. Current events have revived interest in the primacy of the legislative branch in balancing interests and rights, in the States as laboratories for democracy, and in an experimental approach to the solution of social problems in what might be called a reopening of the American mind. The five central chapters explore the skeptical/constitutional connection and the spirit of moderation in these political thinkers. Without an appreciation of this tradition of avoiding dogmatism, people will continue to demand simple answers to complex problems. The book is not, however, primarily a tract for the times but a reflection on the on-going search for a more civil world.

It was a bold and brutal crime--robbery and murder in broad daylight on the streets of South Braintree, Massachusetts, in 1920. Tried for the crime and convicted, two Italian-born laborers, anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, went to the electric chair in 1927, professing their innocence. Journalist Susan Tejada has spent years investigating the case, sifting through diaries and police reports and interviewing descendants of major figures. She discovers little-known facts about Sacco, Vanzetti, and their supporters, and develops a tantalizing theory about how a doomed insider may have been coerced into helping professional criminals plan the heist. Tejada's close-up view of the case allows readers to see those involved as individual personalities. She also paints a fascinating portrait of a bygone era: Providence gangsters and Boston Brahmins; nighttime raids and midnight bombings; and immigration, unionism, draft dodging, and violent anarchism in the turbulent early years of the twentieth century. In many ways this is as much a cultural history as a true-crime mystery or courtroom drama. Because the case played out against a background of domestic terrorism, in a time that echoes our own, we have a new appreciation of the potential connection between fear and the erosion of civil liberties and miscarriages of justice.

In this groundbreaking narrative of one of America?s most divisive trials and executions, award-winning journalist Bruce Watson mines deep archives and newly available sources to paint the most complete portrait available of the ?good shoemaker? and the ?poor fish peddler.? Opening with an explosion that rocks a quiet Washington, D.C., neighborhood and concluding with worldwide outrage as two men are executed despite widespread doubts about their guilt, Sacco & Vanzetti is the definitive history of an infamous case that still haunts the American imagination.

What began as the obscure local case of two Italian immigrant anarchists accused of robbery and murder flared into an unprecedented political and legal scandal as the perception grew that their conviction was a judicial travesty and their execution a political murder. This book is the first to reveal the full national and international scope of the Sacco-Vanzetti affair, uncovering how and why the two men became the center of a global cause celebre that shook public opinion and transformed America's relationship with the world. Drawing on extensive research on two continents, and written with verve, this book connects the Sacco-Vanzetti affair to the most polarizing political and social concerns of its era. Moshik Temkin contends that the worldwide attention to the case was generated not only by the conviction that innocent men had been condemned for their radical politics and ethnic origins but also as part of a reaction to U.S. global supremacy and isolationism after World War I. The author further argues that the international protest, which helped make Sacco and Vanzetti famous men, ultimately provoked their executions. The book concludes by investigating the affair's enduring repercussions and what they reveal about global political action, terrorism, jingoism, xenophobia, and the politics of our own time.

Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were Italian immigrants and they were anarchists. Were these their only crimes? Or did they really murder a factory paymaster and his guard in Braintree, Massachusetts, in April 1920? Seven years later, they were both put to death in the electric chair, and the thousands of mourners who followed their funeral cortege thought that they were victims of prejudice. Were they merely killers? In Sacco and Vanzetti, the latest addition to "New England Remembers" series, Eli C. Bortman decodes one of the most fascinating murder cases in New England history. And he considers the significance of a case that continues to cause controversy. Vanzetti believed that he and Sacco were not dying in vain-that their execution would trigger an international revolt of anarchists. This did not happen, but the shock waves continue to reverberate.