Outrage over the conviction of Sacco and Vanzetti lead to appeals that reach as high as the Supreme Court.

Demonstrations took place in France, Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, Spain, Portugal and Scandinavia. Thousands of French police and troops were needed to prevent a mob from besieging the American embassy in Paris. (It took 10,000 policemen and 18,000 soldiers to protect it.) Albert Einstein, H.G. Wells, Thomas Mann and even the Vatican were among Sacco and Vanzetti's supporters who protested their conviction.

Sacco and Vanzetti's attorneys filed an appeal on several grounds. In addition, one of the prosecution's firearms experts admitted afterwards that the district attorney had framed his testimony to fit the theory that one four bullets in evidence came from Sacco's gun.

Sacco & Vanzetti are arrested May 5, 1920 for the murders of a paymaster and his guard.

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Judge Webster Thayer, whose bias against the two men surfaced repeatedly, denied the first motion for a new trial in October 1924. In the years that followed he would deny five other motions. In late 1925, new evidence surfaced that gave the Sacco-Vanzetti defense new grounds for an appeal: a convicted murderer told Sacco he committed the South Braintree murders. But Thayer again denied the motion for a new trial, finding that the confession was untruthful.

By 1926, Massachusetts' highest court rejected four separate appeals of the verdict and held that Judge Thayer had not committed any errors of law or abused his discretion. The International Labor Defense, set up by the Communist Party, raised $6,000 for the legal fees for Sacco and Vanzetti. Harvard law professor Felix Frankfurter, who would later serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, attacked the Sacco-Vanzetti verdict, the questionable trial evidence and the judiciary in an Atlantic Monthly article.

Frankfurter accused prosecutor Frederick Katzmann of exploiting the public's fear of communism and prejudice against immigrants to prosecute Sacco and Vanzetti and criticized Thayer for allowing it to happen.

Despite countless demonstrations and appeals to save Sacco and Vanzetti, the two are executed by electrocution on August 23, 1927.

Judge Thayer formally sentenced Sacco and Vanzetti to the death penalty on April 9, 1927. In June, in a final attempt to save the lives of the two men, millions of supporters petitioned Massachusetts Governor Alvan T. Fuller to commute the death sentence. Fuller appointed an advisory committee headed by Harvard president Abbott Lawrence Lowell to review the entire case.

The Lowell Committee interviewed 102 witnesses in addition to those from the trial. After two months, the committee upheld the conviction and concluded that Sacco and Vanzetti had a fair trial. Sacco and Vanzetti's lawyers petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court, but the justices refused to hear the case, saying it was not within their jurisdiction.

The battle to save Sacco and Vanzetti ended when they were executed in the electric chair on August 23, 1927.

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