Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned - By John A. Farrell Page 0,178

courtroom and Nathan Leopold shuddered with tears. Word spread that Darrow was to begin speaking on the afternoon of Friday, August 22. Two thousand men and women showed up at the courthouse in what the Herald Examiner described as a “maelstrom of rioters who trampled upon each other, clawed at the police and deputies, tore each other’s clothing, cursed and, for a critical half hour, threatened wholesale bloodshed.” Caverly needed the help of three bailiffs, who formed a wedge, to get into his courtroom. The howling from the corridor was so persistent that Darrow threw up his hands and suspended his remarks while more police were called to clear the halls.

Darrow spoke to three distinct audiences. The most important, of course, was Caverly. Here he was direct, using statistics to build the weight of precedent. “I told your Honor in the beginning that never had there been a case in Chicago where on a plea of guilty, a boy under twenty-one had been sentenced to death,” Darrow said, waving a solemn finger. “If these boys hang, you must do it … It must be by your deliberate, cool, premeditated act.”

Indeed, “in the last ten years 350 people have been indicted for murder in the city of Chicago and have pled guilty,” he said, and “only one has been hanged.”14

Arms folded, Darrow looked up at the judge.

“Your Honor will never thank me for unloading this responsibility upon you, but you know that I would have been untrue to my clients if I had not concluded to take this chance before a court, instead of submitting it to a poisoned jury,” Darrow said. “I did it knowing that it would be an unheard-of thing for any court, no matter who, to sentence these boys to death.”

For the most part, Darrow ignored the detailed testimony of the psychiatric experts—disappointing some advocates of the new science. There was no need for it, he said; it was patently clear from the bizarre nature of the crime that Leopold and Loeb were gripped by forces beyond their control. “It was the senseless act of immature and diseased children … wandering around in the dark and moved by some emotion that we still, perhaps, have not the knowledge or the insight into life to thoroughly understand.” Crowe and his aides sat silently. Caverly leaned forward, resting his chin on his clasped hands, listening intently.

The judge was the most important audience, but there were others whom Darrow addressed. As in many of his famous closing arguments, he sought to teach his fellow Americans a larger point of law or politics—in this case, the evil of capital punishment. “My God! This world has been one long slaughter house from the beginning until today, and killing goes on and on and on and will forever,” he exclaimed. “Why not read something, why not study something, why not think instead of blindly calling for death?

“Kill them! Will that prevent other senseless boys or other vicious men or vicious women. No! It would simply call upon every weak-minded person to do as they have done.”

The final audience was Chicago. Darrow wanted to touch Caverly’s heart, but he knew the judge was a politician and that this speech must move public opinion. As he neared the end of that first day, Darrow played on the emotions of the city’s parents, whose hearts were filled with sympathy for Jacob and Flora Franks, but also with horror at what had happened to the Loebs and the Leopolds.

“I know that any mother might be the mother of a little Bobby Franks, who left his home and went to his school and whose life was taken, and who never came back,” Darrow said. But “I know that any mother might be the mother of Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold, just the same.”

Walking back and forth before the bench, wiping the sweat from his neck with a handkerchief, he brought all the familiar gestures into play: striking his palm with his hand, tugging at the armholes of his vest, wagging his fingers, and tossing his shoulders. “I remember a little poem,” Darrow said. And here, in a voice so low that only those in the front of the courtroom could hear him, he recited the Housman verse that he had read, back in May, at the Lincoln Center event.

And so the game is ended

That should not have begun …

Darrow stood in the tight space before the bar. “No one knows what will be the fate of the child