“They were bad actors anyway and got what was coming to them,” one detective is quoted as saying. That means that any man who gives up his life to the hope of humanizing the treadmill of industry is a bad actor in the minds of the governing class and governing class police. Sacco and Vanzetti are not the only men who have been framed, but they have become symbols. All over the world people are hopefully, heartbrokenly watching the Sacco-Vanzetti Case as a focus in the unending fight for human rights of oppressed individuals and masses against oppressing individuals and masses.
I
WHERE THE CASE STANDS TODAY
On October 23rd 1926 Judge Webster Thayer handed down his decision on the latest motions for a new trial, argued by the defense during the week of September 13th. The decision is a document of something more than thirty thousand words in length. A reader unskilled in the technique of legal judgment gets the impression that the document is more of a personal apologium and defense on the part of the court than the impartial decision of a judge. Not a spark of scientific spirit, or of the consciousness of the infinite possibilities of human error has edged its way into those long involved sentences.
The confession of Madeiros and the elaborate circumstantial case evolved from it by the defense, tending to prove that the South Braintree holdup was committed by members of the Morelli gang of Providence, is dismissed with the following statement:
In conclusion, in so far as the Madeiros affidavit is concerned, it would have been an easy task for this court to transfer the responsibility upon another jury, but if this were done it would be the shirking of a solemn duty that the law places upon the trial court. Guided by this solemn duty I have examined and studied for several weeks without interruption, the record of the testimony upon this motion and upon the Madeiros deposition; and being controlled only by judgment, reason, and conscience, and after giving as favorable consideration to these defendants as may be consistent with a due regard for the rights of the public and sound principles of law, I am forced to the conclusion that the affidavit of Madeiros is unreliable, untrustworthy and untrue. To set aside the verdict of a jury affirmed by the Supreme Judicial Court of this commonwealth on such an affidavit would be a mockery upon truth and justice. Therefore, exercising every right vested in this court in the granting of motions for new trials by the law of this commonwealth, the motion for a new trial is hereby denied.
Further on in this comment upon the plea that Department of Justice agents worked with the prosecution to obtain conviction for murder against Sacco and Vanzetti although they considered them to be innocent (based on the now famous affidavits of Letherman and Weyand):
Cases cannot be decided on the ground of public opinion, but upon reason, judgment, and in accordance with law; for cases cannot be decided on mystery, suspicion or propaganda but upon the actual evidence that is introduced at the trial. If this were otherwise God help the poor defendants in criminal cases, if they are to be acquitted and convicted, not upon evidence and the law, but upon public opinion, which might be formed as the result of an unwarranted public opinion or propaganda.
This might seem to the unlegal mind of a man smoking a cigar at a street corner, a knife that cuts two ways. To continue further on:
Have Attorney General Sargent of the United States and his subordinates and former Attorney General Palmer under the administration of President Wilson (for most of the correspondence took place under President Wilson’s administration) stooped so low and are they so degraded that they were willing, by the concealment of evidence to enter into a fraudulent conspiracy with the government of Massachusetts to send two men to the electric chair, not because they were murderers, but because they were radicals?
Judge Thayer answers, No. But will that be the verdict of fairminded men and women when the full truth of this case is known? Will that be the verdict of workingmen the world over who see their own image in Sacco and Vanzetti? In the face of the evidence as it stands would a plain mind, free from legal technicalities and sectional bitterness answer No?