Word: vanzetti
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...CASE OF SACCO AND VANZETTI, Professor Frankfurter summarizes the history, now seven years long, of a celebrated criminal proceeding which has assumed some of the aspects of an American Dreyfus case. His book may be taken as a special plea to justify the point of view of those who have interested themselves in the cause of the defendants; but it is composed with fairness, and, if read in the same spirit, should do much to dispel misunderstandings which have befogged and embittered the controversy from the beginning. After reading what he has written, one must at least be forced...
...trial judge has stated that the verdicts did not rest on evidence of personal identification but on later conduct of the defendants which indicated "consciousness of guilt". It was the evidence introduced on this question of "consciousness of guilt" which let into the case its disturbing elements. Sacco and Vanzetti could not deny that on their arrest they had acted suspiciously, and to rebut the inference from this behavior they expected at the time to be arrested for another offense--for "radical" activities. The opening which they thus gave was "played up" by the prosecuting attorney and much...
With the sentencing of Sacco and Vanzetti on Saturday, another chapter has been written in the criminal trial that, together with the Dreyfus case, deserves to rank as the most portentious trial of the century. In both cases, the issues involved render the decisions of the court more than ordinarily significant...
...Dreyfus case purported to be the trial of an army officer indicted for high treason; but a wave of anti-Semitism was then sweeping France, and the charge of treason served as but a thin screen behind which was fought another race and religious battle. Sacco and Vanzetti, seven years ago, were nominally tried for the murder of a paymaster and his guard; but a wave of reaction against radical notions of all kinds was at the time sweeping this country, and economic doctrines played an important part in the evidence submitted to a jury impanelled...
...fate of Sacco and Vanzetti, like that of Dreyfus, early in the trial ceased to be the important aspect of the case. Whether or not they go to the electric chair, even in their own minds, long ago, has ceased to be as important as whether or not criminal trials are to be decided on the evidence or on race and class prejudice. Dreyfus was convicted of high treason, not because he committed high treason, but because he was a Jew; and there are many people in the present case who believe that Sacco and Vanzetti have been convicted...