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Tragedy in Dedham

Chapter 27: FOOTNOTES:
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About This Book

This account traces the arrests, trials, appeals, forensic testing, and political fallout surrounding the prosecution and execution of two men accused of a payroll robbery and murder in Massachusetts. It reconstructs the investigation and courtroom proceedings, examines ballistic evidence and expert testimony, and follows successive motions, committee reviews, demonstrations, and international reactions that transformed the case into a polarizing social symbol. The narrative weighs competing interpretations of the evidence, details post-conviction inquiries and confessions, and situates the controversy within broader debates about due process, political fear, and the role of public opinion in the administration of justice.

FOOTNOTES:

[22] In June 1960 the National Broadcasting Company presented Reginald Rose’s television play, The Sacco-Vanzetti Story. For those unfamiliar with the case it may have seemed an entertaining melodrama. As a balanced presentation of facts it was a failure. Eugene Lyons turned off his television set in disgust. Harry King, one of the four surviving jurors, and the only one who saw the presentation, commented: “Well, I laughed. Quite a show. My only reaction is that it is hard to reconcile anything I saw with the actual trial.”

[23] G. B. Shaw understood this xenophobia well. “Americans must decide for themselves” he wrote to Upton Sinclair, “whether they will slaughter their Saccos and Vanzettis and Mooneys; for the moment a foreigner interferes, to yield to him would be an unbearable humiliation; perish a thousand Saccos first.”

[24] This was also Darrow’s own opinion when some time later he came to Boston and talked with Thompson and Felicani.