Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned - By John A. Farrell Page 0,139

had in the first trial, that Darrow had no motive for corrupting the jury.16

And no sooner did the trial begin than it was resolutely clear that Rogers would not dominate this courtroom. Rogers was in awful shape, pale and shaking in court. After ineffectually cross-examining Bain, the lawyer disappeared for several days. Word was passed to the press that he was recuperating from an “illness” in a sanitarium. Rogers was “always uncertain at critical times,” Darrow griped in a letter to Paul.

Darrow understood the danger that lawyers face when representing themselves in court—their judgment is distorted, and every argument seems self-serving. Nor was he happy with the jury, which, he suspected, contained some hostile members. But he tried to pick up the slack, firing questions when Franklin, nervously jiggling a big gold watch, took the stand. Looming before the witness, with his hands in his pockets and head thrust forward, Darrow caught his former employee on several inconsistencies. He brought out the terms of the deal that Franklin struck with the city’s capitalists and got him to plead forgetfulness on some important details.17

The defense wasn’t losing, but it wasn’t winning. Rogers returned to the courtroom with a flourish on February 6, announcing his intent to continue in Darrow’s defense though it meant risking death. With a nurse and a doctor standing by in an anteroom, Rogers—seemingly unable to rise from a wooden swivel chair, his arms dangling at his sides—cross-examined Lockwood and had him relate how Fredericks had schemed to entrap Darrow and then rewarded Lockwood with a job on the county payroll.

“Franklin would never have come out to bribe you at all if you hadn’t called him up and made arrangements at the orders of Fredericks,” Rogers said.

“Probably not,” Lockwood admitted.

“You got that job as a reward for testifying against Darrow … didn’t you?” Rogers said.

At the lunchtime recess, a concerned Conley came down from the bench and ordered Rogers to withdraw. “I can’t, Judge … I’m going to do it if it kills me,” Rogers told him. But, threatened with a contempt citation, he left for two more weeks.18

Behind the scenes, the maneuvering continued. On February 12, George Schilling wrote to Darrow from Chicago, saying that a friend of John Harrington had offered, for “considerable money,” to keep Harrington from testifying. The approach had been made by an investigator named Cooney, who shared an office with Harrington in Chicago and had testified in the Lockwood trial. If well paid, Cooney promised to “fix things up so that neither he nor Mr. Harrington would be witnesses.”

Was it an authentic offer? Could Cooney really deliver Harrington, or was he trying to fleece the defense? Was it a government sting? Schilling and Ed Nockels discussed the matter with William Thompson, Darrow’s former law partner, and all agreed that the offer should at least be conveyed to Los Angeles. “We feel you ought to know these facts, and if it will be desirable for Mr. Nockels to come to Los Angeles in regard to this … send a telegram,” Schilling wrote. In the end, nothing came of it. Harrington was called to the stand and testified as he had in the first trial. But Schilling’s letter throws further light on Darrow’s ethical standards, and what he and his associates were willing to consider.19

Opening for the defense, Darrow stressed evidence cited in the first trial: that the $1,000 check he gave to Franklin was dated October 4—two days before the October 6 date on which, according to Franklin, they first discussed bribery. “He received the check … before he says there was ever any conversation about bribing anybody,” Darrow told the jury. It was merely Franklin’s regular pay. From the witness stand, Steffens and Older then walked the jury through the chronology of the McNamara negotiations, asking, this time: Why would Darrow make plans to plead the brothers guilty if he already knew that Bain was in his pocket? And LeCompte Davis testified that Darrow had wanted to strike Bain as a juror, and relented only at Franklin’s insistence.20

The Darrows had left Venice for a cramped apartment closer to downtown, with a roll-away bed in the dining room. Darrow tried to keep their spirits up, laughing when he could at their predicament. One night, when they visited their friend Frances Peede’s house for dinner, Darrow asked her: “Frances, is this the dining room?”

“Yes,” she replied.

“Where is the bed?”

On the day Steffens testified, he and Older and Darrow and Johannsen telephoned Mary at five