Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (11 page)

The economic hard times, the furor over the anarchists, and the mayor’s assassination seemed to join together in one awful, portentous hour, spoiling the glow of the fair. The newspapers insisted that Prendergast be hanged. So, even, did the prisoners in the Cook County jail, who shouted “Lynch the killer!” as the mayor’s cortege passed by.
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But on November 18, the
Herald
published a letter from Darrow, resisting the rush to judgment.

“If any further evidence were needed to show that man had his origin in the brute creation, the conduct and utterances of the public in reference
to the shooting of our mayor has furnished that proof,” Darrow wrote. “It seems as if the whole community has gone mad at the sign of blood.

“Most men admit that the prisoner was insane and yet lawyers, doctors, merchants and men of all classes are almost unanimous in saying that, whether sane or insane, the wretched being ought to hang,” said Darrow.

“It may not matter much to the unfortunate prisoner or even to his mother and brother whether he shall live or die; but the spectacle of a civilized community pitilessly killing a crazy man will furnish an example of cruelty and fury that in some way must bear evil fruit,” he warned. “We cannot sow the wind without reaping the whirlwind.”
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William Seward could not have said it better. Prendergast was a slight twenty-five-year-old newspaper deliveryman with red hair, crossed eyes, and many delusions. He told the police that he shot the mayor because Harrison had reneged on a promise to name him his counsel. He was known to Darrow and others as a crank who showed up at single-tax-club meetings and sent incoherent postcards to public officials. He had been spotted banging his head against the trees in Humboldt Park, roaming Wisconsin in a blanket, telling farmers about his correspondence with the pope, and sitting in church, mouth agape, head lolling back and eyes rolling. “Insanity was written all over the man,” the Harrison family’s newspaper, the
Chicago Times
, reported. It cited a police superintendent, who said the killer was “mad as a March hare.”
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Nevertheless, the state moved swiftly to trial, seeking the death penalty. The prosecution was led by
A. S. Trude, one of the city’s foremost criminal lawyers, who was appointed as a special counsel in a deal quietly brokered by the
Tribune
company. Darrow closely followed the proceedings, seeking out and talking to the medical witnesses, and tracking the testimony. Two expert doctors who had been hired by the state to declare that Prendergast was competent to stand trial instead declared him insane. “That poor devil is crazy,” said Dr.
Archibald Church, a specialist in mental illness at the Illinois State Hospital. But Trude earned his pay. The jury took but an hour to reach a verdict. Prendergast was condemned to death.
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Darrow took Jessie and Paul to southern California during the holidays, where they visited friends and took in the Tournament of Roses.
And he continued to act as Altgeld’s man in the Democratic Party’s labyrinthine councils. The well-loved Mayor Harrison had imposed a kind of order on the city’s politics, and the process of replacing him commenced, one week after his death, with a riot in the crepe-draped council chambers. The police were called to break up the “demonical” clerks and aldermen, who wrestled one another to the floor and swung chairs, canes, and spittoons.
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Then, in February, Chicago was startled by news that two of the city’s rising legal stars—Darrow and Stephen S. Gregory—had taken command of the
Prendergast case and would ask the courts for a new trial. Gregory was a brilliant lawyer who would one day be elected president of the American Bar Association. He was prematurely balding, hailed from Wisconsin, and called himself a reformer. Had Darrow more respect for convention, his career may well have mirrored Gregory’s. “He was emotional and sympathetic, he was devoted to the principles of liberty and always fought for the poor and oppressed,” Darrow recalled. “In spite of all this, he had a fine practice.”
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They meshed well: the solemn, precise Gregory an expert in case work and tactics, and Darrow the master of stirring arguments. They began by alleging that Trude had used unqualified witnesses during the first trial. Meanwhile, Prendergast roamed the courtroom, interrupted his lawyers, and mumbled and muttered and growled. At one point he sat down beside Trude and asked, “You have no personal feeling against me, have you?” When the man who sought to have him hanged said no, Prendergast looked pleased and said, “Well, I have no enmity against you, either.” In his closing remarks, Trude accused Prendergast of feigning mental illness. “What we need here is less mercy and more justice,” the prosecutor told the judge.

On the afternoon of February 19, Darrow began the final argument. He spoke for three hours that day, and two hours the next morning. “Human life is cheap in Cook County, but the price has not been set by the criminals. It has been set by men in high places. From doctors, from lawyers, from preachers goes up the cry ‘Hang him! Hang him!’ ” Darrow said.

It was Darrow’s first summation in a major criminal case. As he would throughout his career, he mixed doses of philosophy and poetry with the
law. Not for the last time, he argued that men’s actions are determined not by choice, but by the unshakable influences of heredity and environment.

“The only reason why we have a right to punish any individual is because that individual has willfully and conscientiously done wrong,” he said. “Unless this boy is sane he did not do this act. It was done by Him who made the boy.”

Darrow cherished the fatalistic sentiments of
The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
, a collection of archaic verse translated by Edward FitzGerald that was popular in the Gilded Age. From it he took the analogy with which he closed his remarks.

The killer was only God’s flawed crockery, Darrow told the judge. “The hand of Him who made him shook.”
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It was a plea, said the
Post
, “so masterful, so feelingly made and so pathetic that during the delivery the courtroom did not echo a sound save that of the pleader’s voice.” Masterful, maybe, but not persuasive. On February 23, Judge
Theodore Brentano rejected the motion for a new trial and set March 23 as the day for the hanging.
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Darrow and Gregory asked the state supreme court for a stay of execution. Two days before Prendergast was scheduled to die, the Supreme Court turned them down. Darrow gathered signatures on a petition from a half dozen liberal judges, and took a train to Springfield. Altgeld was out of the state and not likely to invite another roasting by pardoning Prendergast, but Darrow hoped to persuade Lieutenant Governor
John Gill to grant a reprieve. Stretching the truth, Darrow told Gill that “Mr. Trude, the prosecutor, has told me repeatedly that this man ought not to be hanged and that he, himself, would interfere before the execution could take place.” Now Trude was traveling, Darrow told Gill, and could not be reached.

Later, Trude complained that “Darrow has perverted, to my injury, private talks we had in the judge’s room.” It was an early demonstration of Darrow’s willingness to dispose of the customary ethical standards—like accuracy or confidentiality—when a client was facing unjust punishment, especially in a capital case. This time, it was counterproductive. Even if Darrow had not misrepresented Trude’s remarks, he had cast the prosecutor in an embarrassing light and snuffed out any hope that the state might accept a deal. When he returned from his travels, Trude worked with renewed vigor to ensure that Prendergast was executed.

Gill declined to grant the reprieve.
Brand Whitlock, an aide to Altgeld who had taken Prendergast’s side, remembered meeting Darrow that day. The lawyer’s face showed fatigue and “world-weariness,” Whitlock said. But on learning that Whitlock was an ally, “there suddenly appeared a smile as winning as a woman’s” and a greeting with “the timber of human sympathy and the humor of a peculiar drawl.”

“Well, you’re all right then,” Darrow said. As he waited for the train back to Chicago, they discovered a mutual passion for literature, and Whitlock gave Darrow one of his unpublished short stories to read.

Gregory was more successful. He went to the North Side criminal court of his college classmate and former partner Judge
Arthur Chetlain and argued that Prendergast had become insane
since
his trial and so, under a little-noted Illinois statute, was entitled to have his sentence reviewed, yet again, by a jury. Just before midnight on Good Friday, less than twelve hours before Prendergast was to hang, Chetlain granted a reprieve.
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Harrison’s sons—Preston and Carter Jr.—had taken over their father’s newspaper. Mindful of the family’s feelings, Darrow had made a courtesy call on young Carter before entering the case. The
Times
had given extensive coverage to the trial, much of it fair, as long as Prendergast was making a steady march toward the gallows. Now the brothers erupted. The
Times
slighted Gregory as a common bankruptcy lawyer who used methods “unworthy of a shyster.” And Darrow was a hypocrite, “a regular Don Quixote, always chasing windmills and ever ready to remove imaginary wrongs, without being able to remove the beam out of his own eye.” He was a “yellow bilious-looking man with a rugged homely face and hair as straight as an Indian,” the
Times
reported, “sanguine, fond of notoriety, having about as much regard for the conventionalities as a heathen.” Not for the last time, a reporter noted Darrow’s sartorial defects. “He wears his clothes as if they had been thrown on him, and they always look as if they had known him a long time.”

The Harrisons saved the worst for Judge Chetlain. They began publishing “toothsome … news morsels” alleging that the judge, who lived downtown in a bachelor apartment, had fathered two children with a young Swedish servant girl, whom he had married in secret and stashed in an immigrant neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. “It was an out-of-town wedding,” the paper said dryly, after doing the math in a
front-page story and suggesting that “blonde … pretty buxom Lottie” was pregnant on her nuptial day. The rest of the city’s newspapers picked up the story, and Chetlain had to be restrained from assaulting an editor. It no doubt came as a relief to the judge when Trude asked the courts to postpone the matter until Chetlain’s term on the criminal branch of the county courts was over.
¹⁰

Judge
John B. Payne took over in June and put the “insanity trial” on a fast track. On June 20, they began. Prendergast sent a note up to the judge, claiming to be the Democratic Party’s candidate for president. Payne put it aside and told the lawyers, “Daylight is burning, gentlemen.”

Trude urged the jurors to rein in their sympathy. The assassin had a fine team of defense attorneys, blessed with “intelligence and cunning” and motivated by a thirst for notoriety, he said. “The more guilty of murder, the more foul and cruel that the murder is in its nature, the more green would be the laurels which would entwine themselves around the brows of these gentlemen who appear here.”
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The defense called its doctors, who offered their opinions and read excerpts from the defendant’s mad scribbling. On the trial’s second day, Prendergast took the stand and, at the invitation of the defense, was examined by Judge Payne. At times the defendant was cheerful and helpful, at other times petulant.

“Where did you get the pistol?” the judge asked him.

“I can’t answer that question. I do not consider it my duty,” Prendergast replied.

“You killed Harrison. What more right have you to live than Mr. Harrison had?” the judge asked.

“I have a certain divine right,” said Prendergast. It had been granted him, he told the judge, by St. Peter.
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The two sides ended a parade of forty-two witnesses and began final arguments on July 2. Darrow, again, closed for the defense. Spectators took every seat, jammed the aisles, and surrounded the judge’s bench.

“I was one of those … following him to his last resting place,” Darrow said of Mayor Harrison. “Could he speak to you today from his great heart and his charitable mind he would ask you to save the city that he loved … from the infamous disgrace of sending a lunatic to the scaffold.”

Darrow’s tribute to the mayor was received in “profound silence,” the
Times
reported. “Tears stood in the eyes of many as he paused at its close, overcome by deep feeling.”

At the end of the allotted hour, Darrow brought his remarks to an end. “To lead this poor lunatic to the scaffold … would wreak infinite injury,” he said. “There is no power on earth to tell how many hearts would be calloused, how many souls would be wrecked, how many blood stains would come upon the conscience of men.”

Now, as in March, he blamed the Maker, not the vessel. “Here is Prendergast, the product of the infinite God, not of his own making,” Darrow said. “He comes here for some inscrutable reason, the same as you and I, without his will, without his knowledge, because the infinite God of the infinite universe saw fit to make him as He willed. His fault is not the fault of Prendergast. It is the fault of the infinite power that made him the object you find today.

“I beseech of you, gentlemen, do not visit upon this poor boy the afflictions which God Almighty placed upon him for some inscrutable reason unknown to us.

“This poor, weak, misshapen vessel, I place in your protection and your hands,” Darrow said. “I beg of you gentlemen take it gently, tenderly, carefully. Do not, I beseech you, do not break the clay, for though weak and cracked and useless it is the handiwork of the infinite God.”
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