Guilty or not? Sacco and Vanzetti were Italian and anarchists so the government had a natural bias about them. They didn't listen to alibis that claimed that Sacco was selling eel that day due to the fact that the alibis were Italian and decided to go with the eye-witnesses. Eye-witnesses can easily be wrong because they see what they want to see, not necessarily what happened. Additionally, the policemen hid information about the guns being different just to 'solve' the case. Yes, they both acted nervous the night of the arrest and they also lied to the police, not making their case any better, but that doesn't make them guilty.
How would you feel if this was you or your family member being convicted for something that wasn't their fault? How would you feel if it was obviously discriminatory? Could we relate this to the idea of Black Lives Matter movement? Could we relate this to stereotypical ideas?
In English, we read a novel called '50 Essays' and one of the essays talked about how people were scared of a certain man only because he was black. Could we relate these ideas here? That these men were only convicted because they weren't American?
I think you make a really interesting connection to today with the current topic of prejudice in the police towards black Americans. Because the case was largely shaped by the racial prejudice that Americans had towards immigrants during that time period, it connects to racial prejudice today. It connects to how there are many, many examples of black Americans who are arrested or even killed without any just reasoning at all. Just as the Sacco and Vanzetti case angered many Americans, these current issues are outrageous and have caused a lot of protests. While the justice system has come a long way in that facts cannot be hidden as they were in Sacco and Vanzetti, the justice system is far from perfect.
ReplyDeleteI feel that this can be connected to other important trials that have happened more recently, like the Rodney King trial, which also made many people angry and led to riots.
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