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Sacco and Padilla

Jose Padilla, once accused of planning a “dirty bomb” attack and held illegally for three years as an unlawful enemy combatant – whatever that is – was convicted yesterday of terrorism and conspiracy charges in what Bloomberg News characterized as a “victory for the Bush administration.”

It might also have been a victory for the rule of law.  Consider the comment by former Navy Lt. Commander and military lawyer Charlie Swift, whose advocacy on behalf of Osama bin Laden’s driver, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, led the Supreme Court to overturn a blatantly unconstitutional Executive Order that denied fundamental fairness to Hamdan and other Guantanamo detainees:  “When the Justice Department said they couldn't prosecute (Padilla), they were wrong.”  Swift added, “not only could they try him, they could convict.”

Both observations are basically true.  But the most compelling aspect of the Padilla story might be the way it echoes the trial of two men who died in the electric chair exactly eight decades ago.

Nicola Sacco, a shoemaker, and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a fish peddler, died because an American jury found them guilty of an armed robbery in which two payroll guards were killed.  But their trial was influenced by the paranoia of the times and stained by a headline grabbing defense attorney who was so incompetent that the late Justice William O. Douglas said that a reading of the trial transcript made him “have difficulty believing that the trial with which it deals took place in the United States.”

Sacco and Vanzetti were anarchists, members of a group that advocated the violent overthrow of the United States government.  As stated in a New York Times review of a new book on the Sacco-Vanzetti trial, “the United States was a nation gripped by fear, for reasons that feel quite contemporary.”  In 1919, domestic terrorists attempted to assassinate prominent American citizens with mail bombs.  The plot failed, but the nation took notice.  Italian anarchists were, in a way, the al Qaeda of the day.  Russia had just been torn asunder by class warfare and the Communist era was at hand.  When an Italian anarchist, Carlo Valdinoci, blew himself up with a bomb intended for the Attorney General, a climate of fear sprang up that encircled Sacco and Vanzetti and their highly publicized trial.

Although they were ostensibly convicted for the armed robbery, the case was thin and, in retrospect, not proven.  But Sacco and Vanzetti’s political views were proven.  There is no doubt they were anarchists.  The prosecutor brought up their political views and the trial judge, Webster Thayer, commented about Vanzetti that, “This man, although he may not have actually committed the crime attributed to him, is nevertheless culpable, because he is the enemy of our existing institutions."

The latter comment was basically true.  As historian Bruce Watson writes in Sacco And Vanzetti, the men, the murders and the judgment of mankind, “Sacco and Vanzetti may have been lambs, but they belonged to a wolf pack.”  The same comment can apply to Padilla.

Padilla’s trial was also arguably influenced by his associations.  The prosecution showed a video tape of Osama bin Laden during the trial, a fairly obvious attempt to season the factual record with prejudice.  An attorney for one of Padilla’s co-defendants has already indicated that he will seek to overturn the verdict on that basis, among others.

The parties also share a degree of self-inflicted enigma.  Sacco and Vanzetti never satisfactorily explained where they were the night of the armed robbery.  Padilla never took the witness stand.  In fact, Padilla’s defense team rested their case without calling a single witness.

Sacco and Vanzetti’s appeals dragged out for years.  So will Padilla’s.  Unlike Sacco and Vanzetti, however, Padilla will not face the death penalty.  At most, he will spend the rest of his life in prison.

Most historians doubt that Sacco and Vanzetti actually committed the armed robbery for which they were convicted and executed.  Both protested their innocence until their death.  Padilla may also cling to his claim of innocence.  Or, like Timothy McVeigh, he may eventually come clean.  Time will tell.

But if he does not, if he continues to contest the allegations against him, his case will confound and obsess historians for decades.  Like Sacco and Vanzetti eight decades ago, his trial will be weighed not on its merits, but on its context.  Guilty or not, Padilla will share one trait with the shoemaker and fish peddler who took their last breath on August 23, 1927.  Like them, he was in the wrong place, with the wrong companions, at the absolute wrong time in history.

© August 17, 2007 by Mike Tully

All content on this page © by Mike Tully