LEGAL FLAWS ARE EVIDENT IN TRIALS OF SACCO-VANZETTI

The following article on the Sacco and Vanzetti ease was written for the Crimson by Professor W. E. Hocking, '01 of the University Philosophy Department.

Sacco and Vanzetti are sentenced to die. The judicical process has finished its work. The jury has spoken; the judge has spoken; the Supreme Court of the Commonwealth has spoken. In the course of the law of Massachusetts, there is nothing more to be done.

Seven years of court business since the South Braintree murder. Ought we not as citizens, unable to follow in detail the enormous mass of this argument, respect the work of our courts and be satisfied with this sentence?

My answer is, No: not unless we are satisfied. Our courts deserve respect; but they can not presume infallibility. It is our privilege, it is our constant duty to judge our judges. In a free state, criminal trials are public trials for this very purpose: the conscience of the law must co-operate with the conscience of the community.

Value of new evidence Ignored

For my part I am not satisfied: I feel impelled to acknowledge that I believe Sacco and Vanzetti as innocent of that murder as you or I.

It is true that the Supreme Court has spoken; and we have reason to honor our Supreme Court. When this Court sustains the lower court in denying the motion for a new trial based on newly discovered evidence, our first impulse is to take that decision as a final security that the alleged new evidence is worthless. But that impulse would be mistaken. For the Supreme Court has not denied the value of the new evidence.

The Supreme Court, strange to say, was not passing on the value of that evidence. It limited itself to a special question. It enquired only whether Judge Thayer is open to judicial criticism for denying the motion for a new trial. The question whether judge Thayer, assuming him to be an intelligent and conscientious judge, could conceiviably have regarded the new evidence as immaterial. If so, the Court would not order a new trial, even though it may have believed to a man that the new evidence was worth bringing before a jury. The Supreme Court was simply unwilling to declare that Judge Thayer had abused his judicial diseretion.

And thus the new evidence must go unheard, even though "if presented to a jury" it might possibly "justify a different verdict". These words are quoted by the Court from a previous case in which the "different verdict" meant a different distribution of property: they are applied to this case in which a "different verdict" means a difference between life and death.

We do not know how many members of the Supreme Bench concurred in this extraordinary decision. It is the custom of the Massachusetts Court to announce its decisions as a body, and not to give voice to minority opinion, if such exists. This reticence does not bind other great courts, such as the United States Supreme Court or the New York Court of Appeals. Nor do such other great courts refrain from making their first concern the one thing of paramount importance, the material value of the new evidence.

Situation is disgraceful

Thus we have the incredible, the essentially disgraceful situation that men may be sent to their death in Massachusetts because the courts refuse to hear relevant evidence. The excluded evidence in this case is such, I verily believe, as would convince four men out of five, if they could, hear it with unblassed minds, that Sacco and Vanzetti had nothing whatever to do with the Braintree murder.

It is an appalling thing to see a great State in the full exercise of its faculties, steer deliberately toward an act of profound and irrevocable injustice. Judicial murder has often been committed by mistake, by inadvertence, or through an accidental accumulation of misleading circumstancial evidence. There is no perfect justice in human affairs. But this is not a case of stumbling in the dark while trying to see: it is a case of wilfully closing eyes to the light. It is not necessary that justice should be always achieved; it is necessary that we have the will to achieve justice. If the courts fail in this will to do justice, the conscience of men must make itself heard.

Ordinarily, such a failure is impossible. Our temper as a people is just. Our courts are prevailingly just. They are not unduly friendly to any class; they are not negligent of the interests of the poor. It is, only a remarkable grouping of special psychological conditions that brings about this miscarriage. The trial was begun in an atmosphere of fear and hatred toward men of radical opinions, anarchists, communists, pacifists. The land was to be purged of such poison by fair means or foul: "away with such fellows from the earth". That panic, with its follies and wrongs, has largely subsided; but these two men have been mentally placed in the dreaded class, and for many citizens it has become impossible to wipe out this first picture and replace it by a saner one, remembering that they are not on trial for their opinions.

Lawyers hanging together

Added to this there has been brought into play the caste feeling of solidarity among men of the legal profession; it becomes a matter of group-loyality to save the face of a judge subject to public criticism.

Finally, the case comes to decision at a moment when on every hand we feel the need for a stricter enforcement of criminal law. The guilty must be punished and punished promptly; public sentimentality toward outrageous criminals must be rebuked. And in the need of the moment we run the danger of striking the innocent with the guilty. These converging circumstances explain the result.

This result reveals a weak spot in a judicial system which as a whole is it worthy of confidence and pride. We dare not rest until this vital fault is corrected.

It is feared in some quarters that an acknowledgment of error would diminish respect for the courts. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Nothing can undermine public esteem for law more certainly than a prevalent suspicion that its guardians care more for their own consistency than for human rights. The real enemies of our institutions are nomen like Sacco and Vanzettil whose criticisms are outspoken and can be met, while their constructions are Utoplan. Our real enemies are those who defend the indefensible, who refuse to acknowledge errors obvious to all thoughtful men, and who defer to lesser interests that primary concern for justice without which no law is worthy of respect and no government worthy of obedience