Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian immigrant anarchists of the militant Galleanist circle, were arrested in May 1920 — at the height of the deportation panic — and convicted the following year of a payroll robbery and double murder in South Braintree, Massachusetts. The evidence was contested at every point; the atmosphere was not. Judge Webster Thayer, who privately called the defendants "anarchistic bastards," presided over both trial and the motions for a new trial, denying them all even after a convicted gunman confessed to the crime.

Seven years of appeals made the case the world's measure of American justice: protests filled capitals from Buenos Aires to Paris, and figures from Einstein to future justice Felix Frankfurter pleaded for review. A commission chaired by Harvard's president blessed the verdict, and the two men were electrocuted on August 23, 1927. Vanzetti's final statement — "that last moment belongs to us, that agony is our triumph" — entered the canon of prison literature; fifty years later Governor Michael Dukakis proclaimed that their trial had been permeated by prejudice and that any stigma should be forever removed from their names.