EIGHTY-SEVEN years ago, Italian immigrants Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were executed in the state prison in Charlestown. The two men, self-avowed anarchists, had been convicted in the April 1920 robbery murder of two men at the Slater & Morrill shoe factory in South Braintree — paymaster Frederick A. Parmenter and his guard, Alessandro Berardelli.

The case is one of the most notorious in Boston — and American — history. The trial, which included suppressed evidence and an openly biased judge, was deemed a mockery. A third man, Celestino Madeiros, had confessed to the crime and asserted the other two men's innocence. Sacco and Vanzetti maintained their innocence to the end. They were executed in 1927. An estimated 200,000 spectators viewed their funeral procession, from the Langone funeral chapel in the North End to Forest Hills Cemetery.

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Source: http://www.bostonglobe.com/