Sacco & Fanzetti

Six years is a long life for an international episode. Six years ago Nicola Sacco, factory worker, and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, fish peddler, were convicted for a double murder in South Braintree, Mass. Today they are neither free nor executed. Radicals and liberals the world over have respectively tossed bombs at U. S. embassies and put up a huge defense fund to show that they thought Mr. Sacco and Mr. Vanzetti had been convicted unjustly. The defense says that in 1920 the U. S. was on a militant radical hunt, and so used a murder conviction as a speedy method of getting rid of two Italian radicals who had harmed no one.

Last week, Judge Webster Thayer in the Superior Court at Dedham, Mass., handed down a decision denying a new trial on the basis of new evidence which he had heard last month (TIME, Sept. 27). He concluded that one Celestino Madeiros, who confessed to the murder charged against Mr. Sacco and Mr. Vanzetti, was "a crook, a thief, a robber, a liar, a rumrunner, a 'bouncer' in a house of ill-fame, a smuggler and a man who was being convicted and sentenced to death for murder." Other evidence did not warrant the belief of his story. Also Judge Thayer could find no "fraudulent conspiracy between the Governments of the U. S. and the State of Massachusetts" to get rid of the two radicals.

So the factory worker and the fish peddler remain in jail with only two hopes left. Either their able lawyer, William G. Thompson, can file exceptions to Judge Thayers" opinion in the State Supreme Court; or Governor Fuller of Massachusetts can grant them a pardon.