Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned - By John A. Farrell Page 0,147

and, when reporters asked for his reaction, offered a Chicago maxim: “You can’t convict a woman of murder in Cook County, especially if she is a pretty woman.”7

DARROW HAD NO such advantage in the toughest criminal case he handled in those first months back from California. An attractive white woman was the victim, and the defendant, Isaac “Ike” Bond, was an African American.

Ida Leegson was an artist, working as a nurse to pay for her studies, who had placed an ad in the newspaper, looking for work. On an October afternoon she set out to meet a potential client. The next morning, her body was found on the prairie. She had been raped and strangled.

The search for the killer was a travesty. The initial description of the suspect was of a short white man. Then came reports that a black man had pawned Leegson’s watch in a shop on State Street, and witnesses told police of seeing a tall “copper-colored” Negro in the company of a white girl. The sensational news of her death, her naked body, and the race of her killer (“Negro Her Murderer … Girl Tortured for Hours”) made front pages across the country. It was soon open season on dark men in the Midwest. Bond, a former deputy, was questioned by police in Gary, Indiana. He went to the Chicago pawnshop to clear himself, but instead the owner fingered him as the murderer.

Critics like Edgar Lee Masters often looked for baser motives—money, publicity—in Darrow’s willingness to defend the misbegotten. But there was no percentage in representing Ike Bond in Chicago in 1914. The city was roiled by prejudice and hate, and would erupt in an ugly race riot in the summer of 1919, in which thirty-eight people would die. Bond “had no money, his friends had none either, and no compensation was to be counted on,” Yarros recalled. But Darrow took the case. “Most identifications are of little value unless a witness has been acquainted with the subject,” Darrow believed. “If a man is black that is identification in itself, in most minds.”

The jury was “seething” after the prosecution gave the gory details of the rape and murder. Respectable white folks—a pawnshop clerk, a railroad cop, a streetcar motorman—swore they had seen Bond in Chicago at the time of the killing. Bond’s black friends from Gary tried to give him an alibi. “The material upon which he had to rely for a defense was the testimony of several ignorant, illiterate and stupid” witnesses who gave “incoherent, rambling, uncertain and contradictory statements,” Darrow’s friend Mulks recalled. “It is practically impossible to conceive of a case where a sentence of death would appear more inevitable.”

But in closing, Darrow challenged the all-white jurors to confront their own prejudices. His eloquence worked its magic. Though they brought in a verdict of guilty, the jurors spared Bond’s life. Of the dozens of men Darrow saved from the hangman, Bond’s rescue was one of the more miraculous. Privately, even he was certain that Bond was guilty.

A few months later, in a public forum, Darrow explained his tactics. “You try to throw around the case a feeling of pity, of love, if possible, for the fellow who is on trial,” he said. If the jurors can be made to identify with the defendant and his “pain and position” they will act “to satisfy themselves.” At this point, the case is won, Darrow said. Juries will furnish their own rationalization. “If a man wants to do something, and he is intelligent, he can give a reason for it,” said Darrow. “You’ve got to get him to want to do it … That is how the mind acts.”

The ordeal in Los Angeles had changed him. That “sad, hard experience made me kindlier and more understanding and less critical,” Darrow would say. “He had been on the ropes,” said Francis Wilson. “He knew what it was to suffer.” Not too long after the Bond trial, Darrow saved the life of nineteen-year-old Edgar Hettinger, a psychiatric patient who had slashed the throat of a woman because he wanted money for a bicycle. Darrow persuaded a judge to accept a guilty plea, and the troubled young man escaped the noose. And when the Chicago police arrested a chronic petty criminal called “Booster” on what they called “general principles,” Darrow took up his defense. It did not matter that “Booster” had a long record, Darrow told the judge. The police have no right to harass citizens. His client had