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1 Was Sacco Guilty 1963

handle is hein.trials/adyt0001 and id is 1 raw text is: FOR SACCO-WIZM i COLLECTION Reprinted from DAILY COMMERCIAL NEWS San Francisco, California AS I SEE IT -- By Hugh Russell Fraser E1QREWORD Devastating. There is no other word for It. Do you know what devastating means? Look it up in the dictionary. It means to make desolate, to destroy completely. This is exactly what ichael A. Musmarno, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of Pqnnsylvania, has done t9 the contention of one Francis Russell, that licola Sacco was guilty of the murder of a paymaster and his guard at Southraintree, Massa- chusetts, April 15, 1920. Francis Russell is the author of a book which all the Tories in the country have beer praising. They say it throws new light on the famous Sacco-Vanzetti Case. (Tragedy In Dedham. McGraw-Hill, 46.95.) There is no such evidence. Justice Mus- manno, after long and patient investigation, has established that the evidence is hear- say, and the hearsay is false. Musmanno's refutation should go down in history as a classic example of how to de- stroy utterly and without mercy an ingen- ious but false thesis. This masterpiece is found in this week's lew Republic, arch 2, under the title, Was Sacco Guilty? I have not space here to go into the shat- tering evidence Justice Muamanno presents. Some of my readers, perhaps, never heard of the case. Briefly, Sacco, a humble shoe-worker, and Vanzetti, an equally humble fish-pedlar -- both of them, by the way, anarchists-- were charged with the murder of a paymaster and his guard, as hitherto stated. They were accorded a jury trial and convicted. Anarchists (people who believe everyone is so innately good that we need no govern- ment at allL) were then, as now, confused with Bolshevists (Communists), and feeling against them for this reason was running high. The eviderce that they were guilty, however, of murder was so ridiculous and flimsy that Felix Frankfurter, then a professor of law at Harvard Univnrsity, wrote ar Prticle in the Atlantic :.'onthly -- later exparded into a rook -- exposing the farce. The article ar.A book made a nation-wide impact. Soon the whole country, and finally a good part of the world. was in an uproar. Heywood Eroun, the most brilliant column- ist who ever lived, lost his job on the 1Lew York World for attacking the conviction day after day. This writer, then a reporter on the Gary Post-Tribune (Gary, Ind.) lost his job for the same reason, but not before the publish- er of that paper, F. S. Snyder, reversed the decision of the editor and ordered that my aralysis of the evidence -- occupying two whole newspaper pages -- be printed without comment. (August 22, 1927.) Sacco and Van- zetti (whom Edna St. Vincent Millay called one of the noblest characters who ever lived) were executed by the State of Massa- chusetts. Subsequently the Wickersham Committee on law procedure sharply and sweepingly criticized the whole trial. But by that time the two irnocent men were already dead. Until 1960 -- some 33 years after the execu- tion -- no serious effort was made, before the court of world opinion, to prove that either Sacco or Vanzetti were really guilty. In that year Attorney Robert H. Montgomery, a corporation lawyer in Eoston (champion of Serator Joe McCarthy and the John Eirch Society) found a publisher for his book: Sacco-Varnzetti: The Murder and The Myth. However, Attorney -ontgomery frankly des- paired of getting the world to accept his thesis. Then, in the Summer of 1962, came the Russ- ell book, and even Russell limited his ac- cusation to Sacco. bow Justice Musmanno has demolished that. Lovers of justice everywhere will rejoice.

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