[3] Musmanno was born in Stowe Township, in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, an industrial neighborhood a few miles west of Pittsburgh, into an ethnic Italian family originally from Noepoli, Basilicata.

[4] He worked with his father in the coal mines, began law school at Georgetown University in 1915, leaving to serve as an infantryman in World War I[5] before returning to earn an LL.B.

Haunted by the conduct of the trial, Musmanno wrote After Twelve Years (1939),[7] a book about the case, as well as two articles in 1963, published in The New Republic and the Kansas Law Review.

This was adapted in part as the basis of the film Black Fury (1935), starring Paul Muni as a coal miner, and with a screenplay written by Abem Finkel and Carl Erickson.

Later it was learned that Stalin's government persecuted many of these returnees, condemning many to internal exile or the harsh labor camps of the gulag in Siberia, where they died.

[12] These interviews, conducted with the help of a simultaneous interpreter named Elisabeth Billig,[13] served as the basis of a 1948 article Musmanno wrote for The Pittsburgh Press, as well as his 1950 book, Ten Days to Die.

[20][17] Musmanno's argument that Hitler's body was never found because it was burnt to near-ashes has been echoed by main-line historians, such as Anton Joachimsthaler,[16][21] and Ian Kershaw.

[22] British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who also investigated Hitler's death, argued (in agreement with later scientific analyses)[23] that bones survive even indoor cremations.

[25] In his 2019 book, British historian Luke Daly-Groves defends Trevor-Roper's criticism as being somewhat just, while pointing out that evidence was limited in 1950, and ultimately praising Musmanno's refutations of Hitler's purported survival.

[12] In 1980, Musmanno's relatives donated his archives to Duquesne University; in 2007, the school digitized the footage of the interviews for a 2010 German TV documentary, with an American version airing in 2015.

He was noted for testifying for the prosecution in the 1950 anti-Communist sedition case against Steve Nelson, who was leading a regional branch of the American Communist Party.

[28] The Communists had sold political tracts (available at any library[29]) for $5.75 to Musmanno, who declared their store "the equivalent of an advance post of the Red Army.

[32] When asked if he read Musmanno's dissenting opinions, Pennsylvania Chief Justice Horace Stern said he was not "interested in current fiction.

"[33] Not long afterward, however, the court issued a ruling in which this Justice participated, and the wording was unquestionably similar to that in one of Musmanno's dissenting opinions.

[34] In a book about personal injury suits and these cases, the attorney Melvin Belli added that Chief Justice Stern "lived to regret" his insulting remark.

[34] In one case, because Musmanno had failed to circulate a dissenting opinion among the other justices before he filed it, the piece was not published in the official Pennsylvania State Reports.

And in the center of all this waste and stench, besmearing himself with its foulest defilement, splashes, leaps, cavorts and wallows a bifurcated specimen that responds to the name of Henry Miller.

Other works include a 30-page transcript of his 1932 debate with Clarence Darrow on immortality in Pittsburgh, The Story of Italians in America (1965), and Glory & The Dream: Abraham Lincoln, Before and After Gettysburg (1967).

[39] This was in reaction to the archaeological discovery of L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland and connected scholarly research showing that Vikings had reached the northeast coast of North America almost 500 years before Columbus' time.

[39] Subsequent scholars agree that the map is a forgery,[41][42] but L'Anse aux Meadows is a confirmed Norse site scientifically dated to the early 11th century.

The last of his many dissenting opinions was against overturning an assault/attempted rape conviction in a case in which the trial judge instructed the jury to seek God's guidance in reaching their decision.

Well, God is not dead, and judges who criticize the invocation of Divine Assistance had better begin preparing a brief to use when they stand themselves at the Eternal Bar of Justice on Judgment Day.

[47]Justice Musmanno concluded: "I am perfectly willing to take my chances with [the trial judge] at the gates of Saint Peter and answer on our 'voir dire' that we were always willing to invoke the name of the Lord in seeking counsel in rendering a grave decision on earth, which I believe the one in this case to be."