J. N. BEFFEL DISCUSSES SACCO-VANZETTI CASE

"It is a crying indictment of justice in America to know that the workingman--and especially the alien workingman--has little chance for his rights in our courts", said John Nicholas Beffel, staff correspondent in Boston for the Federated Press, who in the last year has been spending all his time reporting labor trials and the labor situation for the Federated Press, in a recent interview for the CRIMSON.

Commenting on the Sacco-Vanzetti case to which he gave the most of his attention in his indictment of the courts and of the Department of Justice, Mr. Beffel declared that in many of its elements, this case bears a close resemblance to the Mooney and Billings case in California. "I have been here investigating this case since December 1," he continued. "Sacco and Vanzetti are accused of two pay-roll murders which occurred at South Braintree last April. Sacco was indicted on the testimony of three eye witnesses, none of whom would say positively that he was one of the bandits.

"Vanzetti, who has never had a chance to face his accusers, had, however, been previously convicted of an attempted pay roll holdup at Bridgewater in December, 1919. The so-called identification tests at his trial were as fragile as tissue paper. One boy who was never closer than 145 feet to the fleeing men, identified Vanzetti as the 'shot gun' man', though he admitted he had only a fleeing glimpse of the bandit's face. He said he could tell the man was an Italian by the way he ran.

"Several witnesses materially altered the testimony they had given many weeks before at the initial police court hearing. Benjamin Bowles, special officer, swore originally that the shotgun man's moustache was short; but at the trial, after he had seen Vanzetti, Bowles declared that the shotgun man's moustache was bushy.

"Frank W. Harding at first described the shotgun man as smooth shaven, but later used numerous words to describe the overgrown Charley Chaplin moustache of the same man.

"What happened in the Vanzetti trial is no new story--it is a repetition of practices in the Mooney trial, the Centralia trial, and the prosecution of Sidney Flowers in Los Angeles. Mooney and Billings went to prison on wholly fabricated evidence; the judges in the Centralia case made rulings without a show of regard for the truth; and stool-pigeons were used in the Flowers case; one of them was lately planted in a cell next to Sacco in an effort to get him to commit himself in conversation.

"William James, who graduated from Harvard in 1869, has said something which applies only too closely to cases of this kind. Writing to H. G. Wells in 1906, he said, 'Exactly that callousness to abstract justice is the sinister feature, and to me as to you the incomprehensible feature,--of our U. S. civilization. . . . When the ordinary American hears of these cases instead of the idealist within him beginning to see red with the higher indignation, instead of English history growing alive in his breast, he begins to pooh-pooh and minimize and tone down the thing, and breed excuses from his general fund of optimism and respect for expedience.'"