To begin with, no non-legal person who has only a
small acquaintance with the evidence has any right to assume that Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent. No doubt a great deal of evidence of an irrelevant and tendentious kind was admitted at the trial. It would not have been admitted in a trial here. But it does not follow that there was not enough convincing' evidence. Professor Lowell, the President of Harvard, who was one of the laymen appointed to investigate the trial, came to the conclusion that the prisoners had been justly convicted, and no one can doubt that Professor Lowell is a man of complete honesty and impartiality. Such strictures as he offered referred to Judge Thayer's unbecoming remarks about the trial outside the Court. It must be remembered that lawyers of other countries quite sincerely hold that evidence in a British Court is always too narrowly restricted.
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