Crime Figure. He was one of the principal figures in the infamous "Sacco and Vanzetti" murder case of the early 1920s. On April 15, 1920, he and Nicola Sacco were alleged to have committed the double murder of a paymaster and his guard during the armed robbery of a payroll transfer at the Slater & Morrill Shoe Company in South Braintree, Massachusetts. The perpetrators took more than $15,000 in cash and escaped in a stolen automobile. Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested on May 5, 1920, and indicted for first-degree murder. The trial began on May 21, 1921, and lasted seven weeks. After the jury deliberated for five hours, the defendants were convicted on mostly circumstantial evidence and sentenced to death. The Sacco and Vanzetti case received a great deal of publicity. Many observers believed that their conviction resulted from prejudice against them as poor, uneducated, Italian immigrants, who could barely speak English, and because they held radical political beliefs of Anarchism. The case resulted in anti-United States demonstrations world-wide and at one of the demonstrations in Paris, the event became a murderous riot when a bomb exploded, killing twenty people. The litigation and appeals in the Sacco-Vanzetti case lasted for seven years. They fought a legal battle, which was unprecedented in the history of the American judicial system. The appeals were based on recanted testimony, conflicting ballistics evidence, a prejudicial pre-trial statement by the jury foreman, and a confession by an alleged participant in the robbery. Nevertheless, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were electrocuted by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts shortly after midnight on August 23, 1927, at Charlestown State Prison. Many people question their guilt to this day. Fifty years after the executions, on August 23, 1977, Michael Dukakis, the Governor of Massachusetts, issued a proclamation, effectively absolving the two men of the crime. For this reason, the two men are not called criminals but crime figures.