In 1920 in the midst of a wave of anarchist bombings, two men in Braintree, MA were murdered in an armed robbery. Vanzetti and another political anarchist, Ferdinando Nicola Sacco, were charged with the crime. While anarchy was a non-violent philosophy for many, there was another movement imported from Europe who used bombings as a method of terror and protest to achieve their political aims. Vanzetti and Sacco were of the former type with no criminal record whatsoever but both were considered politically undesirable and part of the terrorist anarchist movement that had been striking in a number of cities. These men were tried, convicted, and sentenced to death for the robbery and murders despite what was very flimsy and contradictory evidence. In Vanzetti’s case, the evidence against him was the fact that 2 of the shell casings from the crime scene were according to the police fired from the same type of Colt pistol that Vanzetti owned. However, 300,000 other people owned the same type of gun, and ballistics scientific evidence later showed that the shells could not have been fired from Vanzetti’s gun. The case became a worldwide cause celebre with politics, police and judicial misconduct. Even today, there is no clear evidence of either their guilt of innocence (although there was even less evidence against Vanzetti), However, the trial brought more publicity to the anarchist political philosophy than the defendants could have imagined. It also called the finality of capital punishment into question and caused major examination of the police, prosecutorial, judicial systems and even the defense attorneys. The two men were electrocuted on August 23, 1927 amid protests the world over.
