GUEST BLOG: Susan Tejada on crime fighting technology in the era of Sacco and Vanzetti

The original electric chair at Sing Sing prison in New York where, in 1905, Robert Elliott executed
a prisoner for the first time in his career.

The story of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two left-leaning Italian immigrants convicted and executed in the 1920s for a murder in South Braintree, Massachusetts, they claim they never committed, became an international cause celebre at the time and is re-discovered in the new book by Susan Tejada, In Search of Sacco and Vanzetti: Double Lives, Troubled Times, and the Massachusetts Murder Case That Shook the World. Here, Susan tells us more about the crime-fighting technology of the era, copied with permission from her web site:
The collision of old and new technology is striking in the story of Sacco and Vanzetti—at least when it comes to cars, coal, and capital punishment.

In 1920 not all law enforcement officials had cars, or even knew how to drive. A criminal with access to an automobile, a so-called bandit on wheels, could often escape unpursued.

A coal bin could facilitate covert ops. In 1921, when defense committee members wanted to make a secret recording of a bribery attempt in their office, they concealed a secretary with an early-model Dictaphone in a coal bin.

The scariest technological innovation appearing in this story has to be the electric chair.

It’s difficult to believe now, but in the late nineteenth century the chair was seen as a humane method of capital punishment, more humane at least than the gallows it replaced.

As a teenager in upstate New York in 1888, Robert Elliott became fascinated with the then-emerging technology of consumer electronics, so fascinated that he decided to become an electrician. He could not have foreseen that he would go on to become a part-time executioner, and would electrocute Sacco, Vanzetti, and three hundred eight-five other people over the course of his electrician’s career.

Visit Susan Tejada at her web site, www.SusanTejada.com.

One thought on “GUEST BLOG: Susan Tejada on crime fighting technology in the era of Sacco and Vanzetti”

Robert Cerra says:

December 30, 2017 at 12:11 pm

One of the critical aspects of the Sacco & Vanzetti case was ballistics testimony. It was also in its infancy .Even the name “ballistics” had not been associated with the forensics of comparing bullets and shell casings. Massachusetts State Police Captain William Proctor was a self-taught ballistics “expert” and the individual who later assisted him Charles Van Amburgh was associated with a firearms manufactrurer,. There was no “ballistics labs” in the United States and it would be years later before a private individual created his own laboratory which examined firearms, bullets and casings. he went on to assist the FBI in creating their first ballistics lab,

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