Michael Musmanno

Michael Musmanno
From a 1960 court photograph
Born	Michael Angelo Musmanno (1897-04-07)April 7, 1897 Stowe Township, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania
Died	October 12, 1968(1968-10-12) (aged 71) Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Resting place	Arlington National Cemetery
Occupation	jurist, politician, naval officer and author

Michael Angelo Musmanno (April 7, 1897 – October 12, 1968) was an American jurist, politician, and naval officer. Coming from an immigrant family, he started to work as a coal loader at the age 14. After obtaining a law degree from Georgetown University, for nearly two decades from the early 1930s, he served as a judge in courts of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. Entering the United States Navy during World War II, he served in the military justice system. After the war in 1946 he served as a governor of an occupied district in Italy. Beginning in 1947, he served as a presiding judge for the Einsatzgruppen Trial in US military court at Nuremberg.

In 1951 he was elected as a justice of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, where he served until his death in 1968. He set a record for the number of dissenting opinions filed. In addition to his long judicial career and postwar contributions in Europe, he wrote sixteen books and many articles related to his court cases and professional career. In his writing he expressed sympathy for working men and deep interest in the Italians in the United States.

Viewed as a "maverick on the court", Musmanno was known for defending Sacco-Vanzetti, as well for anti-Communism and support for civil rights. At the time of his death he was regarded as "one of Pennsylvania's most respected and colorful figures".

Musmanno was born into an ethnic Italian family in Stowe Township, in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, an industrial neighborhood a few miles west of Pittsburgh. He worked with his father in the coal mines and served as an infantryman in World War I before going to college and law school. He became a labor lawyer and always kept a sympathy for the working man.

After entering law practice in 1923 as a lawyer in his native Stowe Township, Musmanno got also involved in politics. In 1926, he ran and lost elections to the Pennsylvania House of Representatives on Republican ticket. As he was genuinely interested in the plight of the working man and was sympathetic to the Italian Americans and other ethnic minorities, who worked in great numbers in Pennsylvania industries, Musmanno volunteered to serve as an appellate attorney during the Sacco-Vanzetti case and moved to Boston. The men were convicted in 1921, in an atmosphere of anti-immigrant feeling. The appeals upheld the lower court decision, and Sacco and Vanzetti were sentenced to death in 1927. Haunted by the conduct of the trial, Musmanno wrote After Twelve Years (1939), a book about the case, as well as two articles in 1963, published in The New Republic and the Kansas Law Review.