Better (very) late than never II

AlterNet: Rights and Liberties: A Power Governments Cannot Suppress: From HOWARD ZINN

Fifty years after the executions of Italian immigrants Sacco and Vanzetti, Governor Dukakis of Massachusetts set up a panel to judge the fairness of the trial, and the conclusion was that the two men had not received a fair trial. This aroused a minor storm in Boston.

One letter, signed John M. Cabot, U.S. Ambassador Retired, declared his 'great indignation' and pointed out that Governor Fuller's affirmation of the death sentence was made after a special review by 'three of Massachusetts' most distinguished and respected citizens -- President Lowell of Harvard, President Stratton of MIT and retired Judge Grant.'...

There must be good reason why a case fifty-years-old, now over seventy-five years old, arouses such emotion. I suggest that it is because to talk about Sacco and Vanzetti inevitably brings up matters that trouble us today -- our system of justice, the relationship between war fever and civil liberties, and most troubling of all, the ideas of anarchism: the obliteration of national boundaries and therefore of war, the elimination of poverty, the creation of a full democracy.

The case of Sacco and Vanzetti revealed, in its starkest terms, that the noble words inscribed above our courthouses "Equal Justice Before the Law" have always been a lie. Those two men, the fish peddler and the shoemaker, could not get justice in the American system -- because justice is not meted out equally to the poor and the rich, the native-born and the foreign-born, the orthodox and the radical, the white and the person of color. And while injustice may play itself out today more subtly and in more intricate ways than it did in the crude circumstances of the Sacco and Vanzetti case, its essence remains.