Eighty-three years ago this month, the Italian immigrants Ferdinando Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were put to death, via electric chair, for the murders of two men during an armed robbery at a Braintree shoe company.
Police believed Sacco and Vanzetti, who were both anarchists, had committed the robberies to support illegal political activities. The case was extremely controversial, with a long list of activists, public intellectuals and celebrities—among them, Albert Einstein, Dorothy Parker, George Bernard Shaw and Edna St. Vincent Millay—questioning the prosecution’s case, and contending the men were targeted because of their ethnicity and political affiliation.
“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,” Vanzetti said after his conviction. “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.”
Since 1991, the Hampden County chapter of Mass. Citizens Against the Death Penalty has marked the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti with a memorial service. This year’s event, organized with the Springfield Diocese’s Catholic Charities Agency, will take place on Monday, Aug. 23, from 5 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. at the Bishop Marshall Center of St. Michael’s Cathedral, at State and Elliott streets in Springfield.
The service will include a talk by Karen Goodrow, director of the Connecticut Innocence Project. According to an announcement of the event, “Goodrow has been active in the post-conviction DNA testing movement and has secured the release of a number of innocent people who had been wrongfully convicted and sentenced to prison. Her work underscores the potential for irrevocable error inherent in the Death Penalty.”
