Biography
Salvatore Accorsi was an Italian immigrant tried for the murder of a Pennsylvania state trooper and acquitted after roughly six months in custody facing the electric chair.
On August 22, 1927, thousands of workers — many of them striking Italian coal miners — gathered at Guido Grove near Cheswick, Pennsylvania to protest the impending executions of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. Mounted state police charged into the gathering, using clubs, horses and tear gas to disperse the crowd. During the confrontation Private Downey was shot and killed.
Accorsi subsequently moved to Staten Island, New York. He was arrested there on June 12, 1929 and extradited to Pennsylvania, where he was confined in the Allegheny County jail at Pittsburgh while facing a possible death sentence. The International Labor Defense, which called the case a frame-up, organized a national campaign on his behalf and supported his wife and three young children during his imprisonment.
His murder trial began in Pittsburgh on December 9, 1929. The prosecution relied heavily on disputed eyewitness identifications. A contemporary defense account reported that a state trooper who positively identified Accorsi at trial had previously testified that he could not describe the person who fired the shot, and that another description characterized the gunman as having a moustache. Contemporary labor publications also presented conflicting accounts of whether Accorsi had attended the protest or was at home several miles away when the shooting occurred.
After deliberating for approximately eighteen hours, the jury found Accorsi not guilty on December 13, 1929, and he was released after approximately 185 calendar days in custody. The novelist Sinclair Lewis attended the trial and spoke at a public celebration following the acquittal.
