"Instead, the prosecution paraded a motley lineup of shaky eyewitnesses, most of them pressured or threatened; befuddled the jury with ambiguous ballistics reports; browbeat the many Italian witnesses who vouched for the whereabouts of the defendants on the day of the murders; and, not least, relied on the astounding incompetence of Sacco and Vanzetti’s idealistic but badly overmatched lawyer. William O. Douglas, the Supreme Court justice, wrote in 1969 that anyone reading the courtroom transcript “will have difficulty believing that the trial with which it deals took place in the United States.”"