Nicola Sacco

NAME

Nicola Sacco

STATUS / DISPOSITION

Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were convicted of murdering two men during a 1920 armed robbery in South Braintree, Massachusetts. After several failed appeals over six years, Sacco and Vanzetti were executed in the electric chair on August 23, 1927.

Timeline

• June 22, 1920 — The first trial began in Bridgewater for attempted robbery and attempted murder involving Vanzetti.
• July 1, 1920 — The jury deliberated for five hours and returned guilty verdicts on both counts in the Bridgewater trial.
• August 16, 1920 — Webster Thayer sentenced Vanzetti for attempted robbery to 12 to 15 years in prison.
• April 15, 1920 — The Slater-Morrill Shoe Company robbery-murders occurred during the afternoon in Braintree, Massachusetts.
• May 5, 1920 — Police arrested Sacco and Vanzetti after Buda arrived at the garage with three other men.
• October 1, 1924 — Webster Thayer denied motions for a new trial.
• May 12, 1926 — The Supreme Judicial Court returned a unanimous verdict upholding Thayer’s decisions on appeal.
• November 1925 — Celestino Madeiros confessed to committing the Braintree crimes.
• May 26, 1926 — The defense filed a motion for a new trial based on the Madeiros confession.
• September 13–17, 1926 — Arguments were heard on the defense motion for a new trial.
• October 23, 1926 — Judge Thayer denied the motion for a new trial following arguments.
• January 11–13, 1926 — Both sides presented arguments to the Supreme Judicial Court on appeal.
• January 27–28, 1927 — The defense appealed once more to the Supreme Judicial Court.
• April 5, 1927 — The Supreme Judicial Court denied the Madeiros appeal.
• April 9, 1927 — Judge Thayer heard final statements from Sacco and Vanzetti.
• May 10, 1927 — A package bomb addressed to Governor Fuller was intercepted in the Boston post office.
• June 1, 1927 — Massachusetts Governor Alvan T. Fuller appointed an Advisory Committee of three.
• August 10, 1927 — John Dos Passos was arrested in a demonstration, along with Dorothy Parker.
• August 15, 1927 — On the day executions were scheduled for midnight on the 22nd, a bomb exploded at the home of one of the Dedham jurors.
• August 21, 1927 — More than 20,000 protesters assembled on Boston Common.
• August 22, 1927 — Executions were scheduled for midnight.
• August 23, 1927 — Sacco and Vanzetti were executed by electrocution in Massachusetts; violent demonstrations occurred the next day in multiple cities.
• August 28, 1927 — A two-hour funeral procession moved through Boston; the hearses reached Forest Hills Cemetery and the bodies were cremated.

People

• Nicola Sacco — convicted defendant; executed by electrocution in Massachusetts.
• Bartolomeo Vanzetti — co-defendant; executed with Sacco.
• Frederick Parmenter — paymaster, murdered at the Slater-Morrill Shoe Company robbery-murders.
• Alessandro Berardelli — security guard, murdered at the Slater-Morrill Shoe Company robbery-murders.
• Webster Thayer — presiding judge in the trials; sentenced and denied motions for a new trial.
• Frederick Katzmann — Norfolk and Plymouth County District Attorney; prosecuted the case.
• John P. Vahey — defense attorney who represented Vanzetti in the first trial.
• Herbert Ehrmann — joined the defense team later.
• Fred Moore — defense attorney involved in development of evidence.
• William G. Thomson — hired to manage the legal defense.
• Aldino Felicani — Vanzetti’s friend; headed the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee.
• Celestino Madeiros (also spelled Medeiros) — ex-convict awaiting trial for murder; confessed to committing the Braintree crimes and absolved Sacco and Vanzetti.
• Joe Morelli — gang leader in the defense’s Morelli-gang alternative theory.
• Michael E. Stewart — local police chief contacted by the Federal Immigration Service.
• Ferruccio Coacci — arrested by the Immigration Service; succeeded in postponing deportation.
• Mario Buda (alias “Mike Boda”) — chief Galleanist bombmaker; rented the Coacci residence under an alias; owned a .32 caliber Spanish automatic pistol; admitted possessing a diagram.
• Riccardo Orciani — identified as among men traveling to the garage on May 5, 1920.
• Robert G. Elliott — state electrician who carried out the executions.
• Governor Alvan T. Fuller — considered requests for clemency and appointed an advisory committee.
• Abbott Lawrence Lowell — President of Harvard; part of the Governor’s Advisory Committee.
• Samuel Wesley Stratton — President of MIT; part of the Governor’s Advisory Committee.
• Robert Grant — Probate Judge; part of the Governor’s Advisory Committee.
• Felix Frankfurter — Harvard law professor and future Supreme Court Justice; published an article arguing for a retrial.
• Dorothy Parker — arrested with John Dos Passos during a demonstration on August 10, 1927.
• Edna St. Vincent Millay — appealed in person to the governor and wrote an appeal.
• John Dos Passos — journalist and writer associated with the defense efforts.
• William Thompson — attorney who made an explicitly political attack during the motion for a new trial.
• Samuel Johnson — brother of Simon Johnson, who had called police the night of arrest.
• Simon Johnson — called police the night of Sacco and Vanzetti’s arrest.
• Mary Splaine — a bookkeeper witness who described Sacco at the scene.
• Lola Andrews — nurse; stated she was forced to sign an affidavit stating she had wrongfully identified Sacco and Vanzetti.
• Lewis Pelser — described prosecutorial coercion while drunk and signed a counter-affidavit.
• William Proctor — state police captain who retracted trial testimony linking Sacco’s gun to the fatal bullet.
• Carlo Valdonoci — Galleanist associated with a June 2, 1919 bombing incident.
• Severino Di Giovanni — Italian anarchist who was thanked by Sacco’s widow.
• A. Mitchell Palmer — U.S. Attorney General, target of a bombing incident.
• Roberto Elia — fellow Galleanist; testified about Salsedo’s death in the inquiry.
• Andrea Salsedo — fell to his death from Bureau of Investigation offices.
• Harold Laski — commented on Grant’s appointment and criticized the advisory committee.
• Thomas Menino — Boston’s first Italian-American Mayor; unveiled a memorial work in 1997.
• Paul Cellucci — Italian-American Governor of Massachusetts; unveiled the memorial work in 1997.
• Michael Dukakis — Massachusetts Governor who declared a 50th anniversary memorial day in 1977.
• Gutzon Borglum — sculptor who executed a plaster cast in 1937.

Background

Nicola Sacco (April 22, 1891–August 23, 1927) and Bartolomeo Vanzetti (June 11, 1888–August 23, 1927) were described as anarchists who were convicted of murdering two men during a 1920 armed robbery in South Braintree, Massachusetts. After a controversial trial and a series of appeals, the two Italian immigrants were executed on August 23, 1927.

Police suspicions regarding the Braintree robbery-murder and an earlier attempted robbery on December 24, 1919 in Bridgewater, Massachusetts centered on local Italian anarchists. While neither Sacco nor Vanzetti had a criminal record, the authorities knew them as radical militants and adherents of Luigi Galleani. Police connected the crimes and recent activities of the Galleanist anarchist movement, speculating that the robbers were motivated by the need to finance more bombings.

Sacco was a shoe-maker born in Torremaggiore, Foggia Province, Puglia Regione, Italy who immigrated to the United States at the age of seventeen. Vanzetti was a fishmonger born in Villafalletto, Cuneo Province, Piemonte Region, Italy who arrived in the United States at age twenty. Both men left Italy for the U.S. in 1908, although they did not meet until a 1917 strike.

The men were followers of Luigi Galleani, an Italian anarchist who advocated revolutionary violence, including bombing and assassination. Galleani published Cronaca Sovversiva (Subversive Chronicle), a periodical that advocated violent revolution, and an explicit bomb-making manual called La Salute è in voi! . At the time, Italian anarchists ranked at the top of the United States government's list of dangerous enemies.

Since 1914, Italian anarchists had been identified as suspects in several violent bombings and assassination attempts, including an attempted mass poisoning. Publication of Cronaca Sovversiva was suppressed in July 1918, and the government deported Galleani and eight of his closest associates on June 24, 1919.

For three years, perhaps 60 Galleanists waged an intermittent campaign of violence against US politicians, judges, and other federal and local officials, especially those who had supported deportation of alien radicals. Among the dozen or more violent acts was the bombing of U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer's home on June 2, 1919, in which one Galleanist, Carlo Valdonoci, was killed when the bomb intended for Attorney General Palmer exploded in Valdonoci's hands. Radical pamphlets entitled "Plain Words" signed "The Anarchist Fighters" were found at the scene of this and several other midnight bombings that night. Several Galleanist associates were suspected or interrogated about their roles in the bombing incidents.

Two days before Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested, Andrea Salsedo fell to his death from the Justice Department's Bureau of Investigation (BOI) offices on 15 Park Row in New York City. Salsedo worked in the Canzani Printshop in Brooklyn, where federal agents traced the "Plain Words" leaflet. People speculated on whether Salsedo committed suicide after interrogation by the Bureau of Investigation, or was pushed out of the window by the only other occupant in the locked room, Roberto Elia, a fellow Galleanist. Roberto Elia was later deposed in the inquiry and testified that Salsedo had committed suicide for fear of betraying the others, portraying himself as the 'strong' one who had resisted. Another anarchist writer, Carlo Tresca, said that Elia changed his story later, stating that Federal agents had thrown Salsedo out the window. The Galleanists knew that Salsedo had been held by the Bureau of Investigation and may have talked to authorities, and they realized they would have to go underground and dispose of incriminating evidence.

After their arrest, Sacco and Vanzetti were found to have correspondence with several Galleanists, including a letter warning Sacco to destroy all mail after reading.

The offence

Sacco and Vanzetti were accused of the murders of Frederick Parmenter, a paymaster, and Alessandro Berardelli, a security guard, at the Slater-Morrill Shoe Company, on Pearl Street in Braintree, Massachusetts during the afternoon of April 15, 1920. Vanzetti was further charged with the theft of $15,776.73 from the company.

An earlier attempted robbery occurred on December 24, 1919 in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, which formed part of the first trial involving Vanzetti.

Investigation

The Federal Immigration Service called local police chief Michael E. Stewart on April 16 to discuss Galleanist anarchist Ferruccio Coacci, who Stewart had arrested on their behalf two years earlier. Coacci had succeeded in postponing his deportation until April 15, 1920, the day of the Braintree holdup. Stewart sent two policemen to Coacci's house on April 16 and found Coacci's wife in good health. Coacci insisted on being arrested for immediate deportation. Stewart later learned that Coacci had been deported on April 18.

On April 20, Stewart returned to the Coacci residence and found "Mike Boda" (an alias of Mario Buda, the chief Galleanist bombmaker) renting the house. Buda volunteered that Coacci's wife had left in a hurry. Under questioning, Buda admitted owning a .32 caliber Spanish automatic pistol and possessing a diagram of a Savage automatic, such as the one used in the murders. Buda said he owned a 1914 Oakland automobile, which was being repaired. Police thought two cars had been kept at the now empty Coacci garage and believed a Buick and smaller car were used during the holdup.

When Stewart discovered that Coacci had worked for both the plants that had been robbed, he returned with the Bridgewater police, but Buda had disappeared, along with his possessions and furniture. Police instructed the Johnson garage, where the impounded cars were held, to notify them when the owners came to collect the 1914 Oakland.

Police were later alerted as Buda arrived at the garage on May 5, 1920 with three other men later identified as Sacco, Vanzetti and Riccardo Orciani. The men sensed a trap and fled. Buda escaped on a motorcycle with Orciani. Buda later resurfaced in Italy in 1928. Tracked onto a streetcar, Sacco and Vanzetti were soon arrested. Vanzetti claimed that the revolver he was carrying was for protection. To avoid deportation, the pair denied being allied with anarchists.

A postscript to the arrests occurred in 1926, when a bomb destroyed the house of Samuel Johnson, the brother of Simon Johnson who had called police the night of Sacco and Vanzetti's arrest.

Following the indictment of Sacco and Vanzetti, anarchists in other countries began violent retaliation, including a booby trap bomb mailed to the American ambassador in Paris in 1921 that exploded, wounding his valet. Other bombs sent to American embassies were defused.

Arrest

On May 5, 1920, Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested after tracking them onto a streetcar following the garage incident. Vanzetti was carrying shotgun shells similar to those used in the holdups and the authorities also found anarchist literature. Both had pistols on them.

Trial

First trial (Bridgewater)

Only Vanzetti was tried for the attempted robbery and attempted murder in Bridgewater that occurred on Christmas Eve, December 24, 1919.

The defense produced sixteen witnesses—All Italians from Plymouth—who testified that at the time of the attempted robbery they had bought eels for the Christmas holiday from him. The prosecution presented witnesses who put Vanzetti at the scene of the attempted robbery, and their descriptions varied, including with respect to the shape and length of Vanzetti’s mustache. Physical evidence included a shotgun shell retrieved at the scene and several shells found on Vanzetti when he was arrested. On cross examination, the prosecution made witnesses appear confused about dates, and a boy who testified admitted rehearsing his testimony, saying: "Sure".

The trial began on June 22, 1920 and ended with guilty verdicts on July 1, 1920. The jury deliberated for five hours and returned guilty verdicts on both counts—attempted robbery and attempted murder.

Before sentencing, Judge Webster Thayer learned that during deliberations the jury had tampered with the shells found on Vanzetti at the time of his arrest to determine if the shot they contained was of sufficient size to kill a man. Since that prejudiced the jury's verdict on the attempted murder charge, Thayer ignored that conviction. Thayer sentenced Vanzetti on August 16, 1920 for attempted robbery to a term of 12 to 15 years in prison, the maximum sentence allowed.

Vanzetti did not testify in his own defense. In 1927, it was said that his lawyers opposed putting him on the stand, and it was also said that Vahey told the governor that Vanzetti had refused his advice to testify. Vahey was described as choosing to represent Vanzetti rather than accept counsel appointed by the court, and the presiding judge was Webster Thayer.

The presiding judge had given a speech to new American citizens decrying Bolshevism and anarchism's threat to American institutions and supported the suppression of radical speech.

Second trial (Dedham, Massachusetts)

Sacco and Vanzetti both stood trial in Dedham, Massachusetts for the South Braintree robbery and murders, with Webster Thayer again presiding. The authorities outfitted the Dedham courtroom with cast-iron shutters painted to appear wooden and heavy, sliding steel doors. Each day during the trial, Sacco and Vanzetti were escorted in and out of the courtroom under a heavy armed guard.

Vanzetti testified that he had been selling fish at the time of the Braintree robbery. Sacco testified that he had been in Boston applying for a passport at the Italian consulate. His lawyer, Fred Moore, contacted the consulate employee Sacco said he had talked with. When contacted in Italy, the clerk remembered Sacco due to the unusually large passport photo and remembered the date, April 15, 1920. The clerk refused to return to testify citing ill health and instead executed a sworn deposition that was read aloud in court and questioned by the prosecution, which argued Sacco's visit to the consulate could not be established with certainty. The prosecution established that Sacco's lunch companions were fellow anarchists.

Ballistics and material evidence were central. Prosecutor Frederick Katzmann changed his mind after promising initially he would not try to link any fatal bullet with Sacco's gun. Sacco allowed his gun to be test-fired during the second week of trial with experts for both sides present. The prosecution then matched bullets fired through the gun to those taken from one of the slain guards. In court, two prosecution experts swore that one fatal bullet, quickly labeled Bullet III, matched one of those test-fired. Two defense experts said the bullet did not match. Years later, defense lawyers suggested that the fatal bullet had been substituted by the prosecution.

Witnesses had sworn to seeing one gunman pump bullets into Berardelli, and the defense asked how only one of four bullets found in the deceased could have come from Sacco's gun.

For Vanzetti’s gun, all bullets found at the scene were .32 caliber while Vanzetti’s gun was .38 caliber, and there was no direct evidence tying Vanzetti’s gun to the crime scene. The prosecution claimed the gun originally belonged to Berardelli and had been stolen during the robbery. No one testified to seeing anyone take the gun, but Berardelli, while carrying $15,776.51 in cash through the street, had no gun on him when found dead. The prosecution traced the gun to a Boston repair shop where Berardelli had dropped it off a few weeks before the murder. The defense raised doubts based on the repair shop having no record of the gun being picked up and on Berardelli’s widow telling a friend that he might not have been killed had he claimed his gun. The jury believed the link.

The prosecution’s final piece of material evidence was a flop-eared cap claimed to have been Sacco's. Sacco tried the cap on in court and it was described as too small, sitting high on his head according to two newspaper sketch artists who ran cartoons the next day. Katzmann insisted the cap fitted Sacco and continued to refer to it as his.

Controversy also surrounded prosecution witnesses identifying Sacco at the scene. Mary Splaine precisely described Sacco as the man she saw firing from the getaway car. Under cross examination, Splaine had refused to identify Sacco at the inquest and had seen the getaway car for only a second and from nearly a half-block away. While a few others singled out Sacco or Vanzetti as men they had seen at the scene, far more witnesses, both prosecution and defense, refused to identify them.

After deliberating for three hours and then breaking for dinner, the jury returned guilty verdicts. Supporters later insisted Sacco and Vanzetti had been convicted for their anarchist views, and each juror insisted anarchism had played no part in the decision.

Massachusetts first degree murder was described as a capital crime, and Sacco and Vanzetti were therefore bound for the electric chair unless the defense could find new evidence.

Outcome

The verdicts and the likelihood of death sentences roused international opinion. Demonstrations were reported in 60 Italian cities and there was a flood of mail to the American embassy in Paris. Demonstrations followed in a number of Latin American cities, and Anatole France wrote an "Appeal to the American People": "The death of Sacco and Vanzetti will make martyrs of them and cover you with shame. You are a great people. You ought to be a just people."

The case also involved protests and advocacy after conviction, including demonstrations and public statements from intellectuals and socialists.

Motions and appeals

Motions for a new trial

The defense, led by attorney Fred Moore, developed evidence raising doubts after the prosecution defended the verdict. Three key prosecution witnesses stated they had been coerced into identifying Sacco at the scene of the crime, and when confronted by District Attorney Katzmann they denied any coercion.

Lola Andrews, a nurse, told authorities she was forced to sign an affidavit stating she had wrongfully identified Sacco and Vanzetti. She signed a counter-affidavit the following day.

Lewis Pelser described how he had submitted to alleged prosecutorial coercion while drunk and signed a counter-affidavit shortly thereafter.

In 1924, controversy continued when it was discovered someone had switched the barrel of Sacco's gun with that of another Colt automatic used for comparison.

Other appeals focused on the jury foreman and a prosecution ballistics expert. In 1923, the defense filed an affidavit from a friend of the jury foreman who swore that prior to the trial, the man had said of Sacco and Vanzetti: "Damn them, they ought to hang them anyway!"

That same year, state police captain William Proctor retracted his trial testimony linking Sacco's gun to the fatal bullet, claiming he never meant to imply the connection and had repeatedly told Katzmann there was no such connection, but that the prosecution had crafted its trial questioning to disguise his true assessment. Thayer denied all motions for a new trial on October 1, 1924.

Appeal to the Supreme Judicial Court

The defense appealed to the Supreme Judicial Court (SJC), the highest level of the state's judicial system. Both sides presented arguments to its 5 judges on January 11–13, 1926.

The SJC returned a unanimous verdict upholding Judge Thayer's decisions on May 12, 1926. The Court did not have the authority to review the trial record as a whole or judge fairness. Instead, it considered whether Thayer had abused his discretion during the trial. Thayer later claimed the SJC had "approved" the verdicts, and advocates protested that the Court only found "no error" in his individual rulings.

Madeiros confession and second appeal

In November 1925, Celestino Madeiros confessed to committing the Braintree crimes and absolved Sacco and Vanzetti of participation.

After the SJC had denied the defense appeal and Madeiros was convicted, the defense investigated details of Madeiros’ story. Police interviews led them to the Morelli gang based in Providence, Rhode Island, and an alternative theory was developed based on the gang’s history of shoe-factory robberies, connections to a car like that used in Braintree, and other details. The gang leader Joe Morelli was described as bearing a striking resemblance to Sacco.

The defense filed a motion for a new trial based on Madeiros confession on May 26, 1926, including 64 affidavits, while the prosecution countered with 26 affidavits.

When Thayer heard arguments on September 13–17, 1926, the defense charged that the U.S. Justice Department was aiding the prosecution by withholding information obtained in its own investigation. Attorney William Thompson made an explicitly political attack: "A government which has come to value its own secrets more than it does the lives of its citizens has become a tyranny, whether you call it a republic, a monarchy, or anything else!"

Judge Thayer denied this motion for a new trial on October 23, 1926. Thayer addressed the defense claims against the federal government, describing the defense as suffering from "a new type of disease,...a belief in the existence of something which in fact and truth has no such existence."

Three days later, the Boston Herald responded by reversing its position and calling for a new trial.

The defense promptly appealed to the Supreme Judicial Court again and presented arguments on January 27–28, 1927. Harvard law professor and future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter published an article in the Atlantic Monthly arguing for a retrial. The Supreme Judicial Court denied the Madeiros appeal on April 5, 1927.

Protests and advocacy

John Dos Passos came to Boston to cover the case as a journalist, stayed to author a pamphlet called Facing the Chair, and was arrested in a demonstration on August 10, 1927, along with Dorothy Parker.

After being arrested while picketing the State House, Edna St. Vincent Millay pleaded her case to the governor in person and then wrote an appeal: "I cry to you with a million voices: answer our doubt...There is need in Massachusetts of a great man tonight."

Albert Einstein, George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells were among others who wrote to Fuller or signed petitions.

The president of the American Federation of Labor cited "the long period of time intervening between the commission of the crime and the final decision of the Court" and "the mental and physical anguish which Sacco and Vanzetti must have undergone during the past seven years" in a telegram to the governor.

Benito Mussolini made inquiries through diplomatic channels and was prepared to ask Governor Fuller to commute the sentences if granted.

Sentencing

On April 9, 1927, Judge Thayer heard final statements from Sacco and Vanzetti.

Vanzetti made the following statement:

I would not wish to a dog or to a snake, to the most low and misfortunate creature of the earth–I would not wish to any of them what I have had to suffer for things that I am not guilty of. But my conviction is that I have suffered for things that I am guilty of. I am suffering because I am a radical and indeed I am a radical; I have suffered because I am an Italian and indeed I am an Italian...if you could execute me two times, and if I could be reborn two other times, I would live again to do what I have done already.

Thayer declared:

The Court has absolutely nothing to do with that question.

Thayer sentenced each of them to "suffer the punishment of death by the passage of a current of electricity through your body" during the week beginning July 10.

The execution date was postponed twice while the governor considered requests for clemency.

Clemeny process / advisory committee

On May 10, 1927, a package bomb addressed to Governor Fuller was intercepted in the Boston post office.

On June 1, 1927, Massachusetts Governor Alvan T. Fuller appointed an Advisory Committee of three: President Abbott Lawrence Lowell of Harvard, President Samuel Wesley Stratton of MIT, and Probate Judge Robert Grant. The committee was tasked with reviewing the trial to determine whether it had been fair.

The committee determined after hearings and review that the trial had been fair and a new trial was not warranted. It criticized Thayer’s off-the-bench talking about the case, and using words provided by Judge Grant, stated:

He ought not to have talked about the case off the bench, and doing so was a grave breach of judicial decorum.

The committee also reported that trial jurors were almost unanimous in praising Thayer’s conduct.

Harold Laski criticized the decision, describing it as Lowell’s "loyalty to his class."

Execution and funeral

On August 15, 1927, a bomb exploded at the home of one of the Dedham jurors. More than 20,000 protesters assembled on Boston Common on Sunday, August 21.

In their cells at Charlestown State Prison, both Sacco and Vanzetti refused a priest several times on their last day. Their attorney William Thomson asked Vanzetti to make a statement opposing violent retaliation for his death, and they discussed forgiving one’s enemies.

Celestino Madeiros, whose execution had been delayed in case his testimony was required at another trial of Sacco and Vanzetti, was executed first.

Sacco was next and went quietly to the electric chair, then shouted "Viva l'anarchia!" and "Farewell, mia madre." Vanzetti shook hands with guards and thanked them for their kind treatment, read a statement proclaiming his innocence, and finally said: "I wish to forgive some people for what they are now doing to me."

All three executions were carried out by Robert G. Elliott, the "state electrician".

Violent demonstrations swept through many cities the next day, including Geneva, London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Tokyo. In South America, wildcat strikes closed factories. Three died in Germany, and protesters in Johannesburg burned an American flag outside the American embassy.

At the funeral parlor in Boston's North End, more than 10,000 mourners viewed Sacco and Vanzetti in open caskets over two days. At the funeral parlor, a wreath announced Aspettando l'ora di vendetta (Awaiting the hour of vengeance). On Sunday, August 28, a two-hour funeral procession bearing huge floral tributes moved through the city. Police blocked the route, passing the State House, and mourners and police clashed. The hearses reached Forest Hills Cemetery where, after a brief eulogy, the bodies were cremated.

The Boston Globe called it "one of the most tremendous funerals of modern times." Will H. Hays ordered all film of the funeral procession destroyed.

Sacco's ashes were stated to be in Torremaggiore, the town of his birth, at the base of a monument erected in 1998. Vanzetti's ashes were stated to have been buried with his mother in Villafalletto.

Prison writings and statements

A June 1926 issue of Protesta Umana published by their Defense Committee carried an article signed by Sacco and Vanzetti that appealed for retaliation. Vanzetti stated: " I will try to see Thayer death [sic] before his pronunciation of our sentence" and asked fellow anarchists for " revenge, revenge in our names and the names of our living and dead. " In a reference to Luigi Galleani's bomb-making manual (covertly titled La Salute è in voi! ), the article concluded "Remember, La Salute è in voi!".

Both Sacco and Vanzetti wrote dozens of letters expressing their innocence and insisted they had been framed because they were anarchists.

Aftermath and continuing protests

A few days after the executions, Sacco’s widow thanked Italian anarchist Severino Di Giovanni by letter for his support and added that the director of the tobacco firm Combinados had offered to produce a cigarette brand named "Sacco & Vanzetti".

On November 26, 1927, Di Giovanni and his comrades bombed a Combinados tobacco shop shortly afterwards. Di Giovanni bombed the American embassy in Buenos Aires a few hours after Sacco and Vanzetti were condemned to death.

On December 24, 1927, Di Giovanni blew up the headquarters of the Citibank and of the Bank of Boston in Buenos Aires in apparent protest of the execution. In December 1928, Di Giovanni and his comrades failed in an attempt to bomb the train in which President Herbert Hoover traveled during his visit to Argentina.

Three months later, bombs exploded in the New York subway, in a Philadelphia church, and at the home of the mayor of Baltimore. One of the jurors in the Dedham trial had his house bombed, throwing him and his family from their beds.

Less than a year after the executions, a bomb destroyed the front porch of the home of executioner Robert Elliott. As late as 1932, Judge Thayer's home was wrecked and his wife and housekeeper were injured in a bomb blast. Afterward, Thayer lived permanently at his club in Boston, guarded 24 hours a day until his death.

In the fall of 1928, Upton Sinclair published his novel Boston, an indictment of the American judicial system that took the case, especially Vanzetti's life and writings, as its focus, mixing fictional characters with actual participants in the trials. Sinclair’s portrait of Vanzetti was sympathetic, but advocates for the defense were disappointed by the failure to absolve Sacco and Vanzetti of the crimes while arguing their trial had been unjust. Sinclair later said:

Some of the things I told displeased the fanatical believers; but having portrayed the aristocrats as they were, I had to do the same thing for the anarchists.

When the letters Sacco and Vanzetti wrote appeared in print in 1928, journalist Walter Lippmann commented:

If Sacco and Vanzetti were professional bandits, then historians and biographers who attempt to deduce character from personal documents might as well shut up shop. By every test that I know of for judging character, these are the letters of innocent men.

On January 3, 1929, as Gov. Fuller left the inauguration of his successor, he found a copy of the Letters thrust at him by someone in the crowd. Fuller knocked it to the ground "with an exclamation of contempt."

In 1936, on the day Harvard celebrated its 300th anniversary, 28 Harvard alumni issued a statement attacking the University's retired President Lowell for his role on the Governor's Advisory Committee in 1927, including Heywood Broun, Malcolm Cowley, Granville Hicks, and John Dos Passos.

Massachusetts judicial reform

A movement for "drastic reform" quickly took shape following the Supreme Judicial Court's assertion that it could not order a new trial even if there was new evidence that "would justify a different verdict". In December 1927, the Massachusetts Judicial Council cited the Sacco and Vanzetti case as evidence of "serious defects in our methods of administering justice."

The council proposed restrictions on the number and timing of appeals and addressed the SJC's right to review. Governor Fuller endorsed the proposal in his January 1928 annual message. The Judicial Council repeated recommendations in 1937 and 1938. In 1939 the proposed language was adopted, and the SJC gained authority to consider an entire case on the law and on the evidence or "for any other reason that justice may require" (Mass laws, 1939 c 341).

Memorials and later positions

Dukakis proclamation

In 1977, as the 50th anniversary of the executions approached, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis asked the Office of the Governor's Legal Counsel to report on whether there were substantial grounds for believing—at least in light of legal standards of today—that Sacco and Vanzetti were unfairly convicted and executed, and to recommend action.

Based on recommendations, Dukakis declared August 23, 1977, the 50th anniversary of the executions, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti Memorial Day. The proclamation, issued in English and Italian, stated that Sacco and Vanzetti had been unfairly tried and convicted and that "any disgrace should be forever removed from their names." It did not pardon them, and it did not assert their innocence. A resolution to censure the Governor failed in the Massachusetts Senate by a vote of 23 to 12.

1997 memorial unveiling

On August 23, 1997, on the 70th anniversary of the executions, Boston's first Italian-American Mayor Thomas Menino and the Italian-American Governor of Massachusetts Paul Cellucci unveiled a memorial work at the Boston Public Library, where it remained on display. Menino said:

"The city's acceptance of this piece of artwork is not intended to reopen debate about the guilt or innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti," Menino said. "It is intended to remind us of the dangers of miscarried justice, and the right we all have to a fair trial."

Other details

Sacco and Vanzetti were also described as having had a politically motivated dispute over guilt or innocence and whether trials were fair, with historians not reaching a consensus.

The Defense Committee was formed on May 9, 1920 following the arrests by a group of fellow anarchists headed by Vanzetti's 23-year-old friend Aldino Felicani. Over the next 7 years, it raised $300,000.

Fred Moore drew on its funds for investigations, though differences arose when Moore tried to determine who had committed the South Braintree crimes over objections from anarchists. After the committee hired William G. Thomson to manage the legal defense, he objected to the committee’s propaganda efforts.

The defense committee made publicity efforts through the New Republic and labor union publications, including pamphlets and weekly story sending in winter 1920-21, and sent speakers to Italian communities in factory towns and mining camps. It later added staff from outside the anarchist movement, notably Mary Donovan, a 40-year-old labor leader and Sinn Fein organizer. In 1927, she and Felicani recruited Gardner Jackson, a Boston Globe reporter, to manage publicity and mediate between anarchists and supporters.

Sacco thanked Gardner Jackson a few weeks before his execution, stating:

"We are one heart, but unfortunately we represent two different class....But, whenever the heart of one of the upper class join with the exploited workers for the struggle of the right in the human feeling is the feel of an spontaneous attraction and brotherly love to one another."

John Dos Passos joined the committee and wrote its 127-page official review, Facing the Chair: Story of Americanization of Two Foreignborn Workmen.

After the executions, the committee continued work helping to gather material that appeared as The Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti.

During sentencing and imprisonment, Sacco and Vanzetti refused a priest several times on the last day, and their attorney William Thomson asked Vanzetti to oppose violent retaliation and they discussed forgiving enemies.

Further investigations and later claims included ballistic tests in October 1961 using improved technology using Sacco's Colt automatic, with results confirming the bullet that killed Berardelli in 1920 was fired from Sacco's pistol. Subsequent investigations in 1983 also supported this finding.

In 1988, Charlie Whipple revealed a conversation with Sergeant Edward J. Seibolt in 1937. Whipple reported that Seibolt said the police ballistics experts switched the murder weapon and that Seibolt indicated he would deny it if Whipple ever printed it. It was stated that it was not known if Seibolt was recalling Albert Hamilton's testimony and behavior on the stand when Hamilton apparently switched Sacco's gun barrel with that of another Colt automatic.

The record further discussed claims that Sacco's .32 Colt pistol passed in and out of police custody and was dismantled several times, interrupting chain of custody, including in 1924 prior to a gun barrel switch and between 1927 and 1961.

A witness was quoted insisting the gunman, alleged to be Sacco, fired "four or five times" and "stood guard over him," and it was stated that only one fatal bullet was ever linked to Sacco's pistol.

The Lowell Commission dismissed the defense’s bullet-planting claim as desperate, and it was stated that in 1985 historians William Kaiser and David Young made a case for a switch in their book Postmortem: New Evidence in the Case of Sacco and Vanzetti.

In 1973, a former mobster published a confession by Frank "Butsy" Morelli, saying:

"We whacked them out, we killed those guys in the robbery," and that "These two greaseballs Sacco and Vanzetti took it on the chin."

In 1982, Giovanni Gambera told his son that "everyone [in the anarchist inner circle] knew that Sacco was guilty and that Vanzetti was innocent as far as the actual participation in killing."

It was stated that some historians concluded the prosecution, trial, and aftermath constituted disregard for political civil liberties, including Thayer’s decision to deny a retrial, and that others argued the men were known anarchist members of a militant organization.

It was also stated that a later Italian history of anarchism reported reminiscences of a political ally describing the decision for Italian anarchists to go to Mexico as coming from comrades alarmed by the idea that remaining in the United States would restrain leaving for Europe where revolution promised to spread after February.

Sacco and Vanzetti were also referenced in literary and intellectual works, memorials, and cultural references, including a mosaic mural on the main campus of Syracuse University and the existence of a memorial committee attempting to present a plaster cast executed in 1937 by Gutzon Borglum to Massachusetts governors and Boston mayors in 1937, 1947, and 1957 without success.

The “Sacco and Vanzetti Century” was described as an American anarchist military unit in the Durruti Column that fought in the Spanish Civil War, and it was also stated that many objects in the former USSR were named after "Sacco and Vanzetti", including a beer production facility in Moscow, a kolkhoz in Donetsk region, Ukraine, and an apartment complex in Yekaterinburg. Numerous towns in Italy were said to have streets named after Sacco and Vanzetti, including Via Sacco-Vanzetti in Torremaggiore and in Villafalletto.