The Legacy of Sacco & Vanzetti
The Trials
The Bridgewater Trial
Vanzetti's trial began on June 22, 1920, at Plymouth, Massachusetts. The presiding judge was Webster Thayer.
Thayer was sixty-three, a judge of high reputation, who had just two months before presided over a case in which an anarchist, Sergei Zabraff, had been acquitted of breaking the laws against anarchy that had been passed at the urging of Attorney General Palmer. Thayer criticized the jury for their decision, and, as a result, had become a popular hero in the press. He was a graduate of Dartmouth, and part of the Worchester, Massachusetts, social elite.
Frederick Katzmann prosecuted for the state.
Vanzetti was represented by J.P. Vahey, a local politician, who advised him not to testify in his own behalf, so that there would be no opportunity for the prosecution to reveal his radical political views, and thus prejudice the jury. Vahey would defend him on the basis of the testimony of sixteen fellow Italians who had seen him peddling fish at the time the holdup.
The day before Christmas was an important day in Italian culture, calling for the preparation of eels, which Vanzetti sold. One witness, Beltrando Brini, a thirteen-year-old who helped Vanzetti with his deliveries, was discounted by the prosecution as a friend of Vanzetti's who had been coached in his testimony. Many of Vanzetti's witnesses spoke English so poorly that an interpreter was required.
The prosecution had only one witness who was positive that Vanzetti was one of the holdup men, testifying that he had a "trimmed mustache," although Vanzetti's was quite large and bushy. The other witnesses thought that Vanzetti resembled the man with the shotgun. Vanzetti, when arrested, had shotgun shells in his possession. One witness, who could not identify Vanzetti directly, knew that the bandit was a foreigner by the way he ran.
During the long appeal process that followed the second trial, much was made of Vanzetti's failure to take the stand in his own defense.
The jury took five and a half hours to find Vanzetti guilty. The usual sentence for attempted armed robbery was eight to ten years in prison. Judge Thayer sentenced Vanzetti to fifteen years in Charlestown State Penitentiary. He thanked the jury with the words "You may go to your homes with the feeling that you did respond as the soldier responded to his service when he went across the seas to the call of the Commonwealth."