Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (61 page)

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 they get or the child they bear,” he said. His voice was tight with emotion now.

“I am sorry for these fathers and these mothers. The mother who looks into the blue eyes of her little babe cannot help wonder what will be the end of this child, whether it will be crowned with the greatest promises which her mind can imagine, or whether he may meet death from the gallows,” he said. “All she can do is to raise him with care, to watch over him tenderly, to meet life with hope and trust and confidence and to leave the rest with fate.”

Women in the audience—including Judge Caverly’s wife and sister—wept. The defendants had stopped laughing; he had touched even their cold souls. They blinked back tears, and Leopold stumbled from the courtroom, his head bowed. In his cell that night, Loeb wrote a letter to his lawyer.

“Only the tears in my eyes as you talked and the feeling in my heart
could express the admiration, the love, that I have for you,” Loeb wrote. “I have gone thru so much of my life a play actor—but I am sure you know when it is the heart that is speaking. A heart, Mr. Darrow, with a thick coating of deceit, of selfishness, but a heart that way down deep must, because I am the son of my father and mother, have some good in it, and my message comes from there.”
¹⁵

J
UDGE
C
AVERLY HAD
scheduled a morning session for Saturday, and so, again, Darrow spoke for half a day. The crowds, alarmed by the reports of Friday’s riot, stayed away. Darrow, in the calmer setting, was solemn.

“I can picture them, wakened in the gray light of morning, furnished a suit of clothes by the state, led to the scaffold, their feet tied, a black cap drawn over their heads, placed on a trap door … so that it falls under them and they are only stopped by the rope around their necks,” he said. “Do I need to argue to your Honor that cruelty only makes cruelty? That hatred only causes hatred? That if there is any way to … soften the human heart, which is hard enough at its best, if there is any way to kill evil and hatred and all that goes with it, it is not through evil and hatred and cruelty; it is through charity, and love and understanding?”

He dropped his arms, as if in futility. “I am asking your Honor not to visit the grave and dire and terrible misfortune … upon these two boys,” he said. “I do not know where to place it. I know it is somewhere in the infinite economy of nature … I know it is there, and to say that because they are as they are you should hang them, is brutality and cruelty, and savors of the time of fang and claw.” Tears were streaming down his face.

A
ND AT THE
age of sixty-seven, Darrow spoke all day on Monday. An entire day, two sessions of court, two lives at stake.

He talked about each of the defendants at length. Dickie Loeb, in the hands of his mad governess, “had no pleasures, such as a boy should have, except in what was gained by lying and cheating.” And there grew in his brain—“dwarfed and twisted”—a hunger for crime. Darrow’s voice cracked a bit and his eyes glistened as he ventured back to his own childhood.

“Before I would tie a noose around the neck of a boy I would try to call back into my mind the emotions of youth … I would try to remember how weak and inefficient was youth in the presence of the surging controlling feelings of the child,” he told the judge.

“It is not enough to take a boy filled with his dreams and his fantasies and living in an unreal world, but the age of adolescence comes on him … the most trying period of the life of a child … when the call of sex is new and strange … moved by the strongest feelings and passions that have ever moved men.…

“This boy needed more home, needed more love, more affection, more direction,” Darrow said. “He needed to have his emotions awakened. He needed to have guiding hands along the serious road that youth must travel.”

Then Darrow turned to Nathan Leopold.

“He was just a half boy—an intellect, an intellectual machine going without balance,” Darrow said. “At 17, at 16, at 18, while healthy boys were playing baseball or working on the farm, or doing odd jobs, he was reading Nietzsche, a boy who never should have seen it.” In his last years, Nietzsche suffered from mental illness. “His own doctrines made him a maniac,” said Darrow. “And here is a young boy, in the adolescent age, harassed by everything that harasses children, who takes this philosophy and swallows it, who believes it literally, lives his life on it.”

Darrow was, in retrospect, a uniquely apt lawyer for Leopold and Loeb. He had the audacity to treat judges and juries to original sermons on an intellectual plane far higher than the usual courtroom wrangling, and to do so in a captivating way. People listened to his reasoning, despite its strangeness, its theory, its difficult demand for mercy.

“I am trying to trace causes. I am trying to trace them honestly. I am trying to trace them with the light I have,” he said. “I am trying to say to this court that these boys are not responsible for this … and asking this court not to visit the judgment of its wrath upon them for things for which they are not to blame.…

“Sometimes, your Honor, a boy of great promise is cut off in his early youth. Sometimes he dies and is placed in a culvert. Sometimes a boy of great promise stands on a trap door and is hanged by the neck until dead.”

After the noon recess, Darrow resumed his place before the bench. He began again, speaking calmly. The courtroom was packed “like a black
hole. Hardly a breath of air moved in it,” the
News
said. But the crowd stayed with him, listening to every word. Judge Caverly toyed with his pencil, his face flushed, from time to time, with the heat and the emotion.

“Ninety men have been hanged by the neck until dead, because of the ancient superstition that in some way hanging one man keeps another from committing a crime,” Darrow said. He looked around dejectedly. “The ancient superstition.…

“We have not grown better than the ancients. We have grown more squeamish; we do not like to look at it, that is all,” he said.

But “in ninety men hanged in Illinois from its beginning, not one single person under 24 was ever hanged upon a plea of guilty—not one.”

He cited, one final time, Crowe’s crack about a “friendly judge.” He leaned across the shelf separating him from the judge, as close as he could get. “Your Honor, that is a blow below the belt,” he said. “It was carved out of the air, to awe and influence the court.”

Americans had lost a measure of innocence in the Great War, Darrow said. Man grew coarse. Humanity became hard. Could it come as a surprise that boys were cruel?

“I have spoken about the war. I believed in it,” Darrow said. “I approved of it; I joined in the general cry of madness and despair.…

“Right or wrong, justifiable or unjustifiable … it changed the world. For four long years the civilized world was engaged in killing men. Christian against Christian, barbarians uniting with Christians to kill Christians; anything to kill. It was taught in every school … the little children played at war.

“Do you suppose this world has ever been the same since?” Darrow asked.

“How long, your Honor will it take for the world to get back in its human emotions to where it stood before the war? How long will it take the calloused heart of man before the scars of hatred and cruelty shall be removed? We read of killing one hundred thousand in a day; probably exaggerated, but what of it? We read about it and rejoice in it; it was the other fellows who were killed. We were fed on flesh and drank blood.…

“I have been sorry, and I am sorry for the bereavement of Mr. and Mrs. Franks,” he said, “for those broken ties that cannot be mended. All I can hope and wish is that some good may come from it.

“But as compared with the families of Leopold and Loeb, they are to be envied. They are to be envied, and everyone knows it.

“I do not know how much salvage there is in these two boys. I hate to say it in their presence, but what is there to look forward to? I do not know but what your Honor would be merciful if you tied a rope around their neck and let them die; merciful to them, but not merciful to civilization, and not merciful to those who would be left behind. I do not know; to spend the balance of their days in prison is mighty little to look forward to, if anything.”

He wiped tears from his eyes with the back of a trembling hand as once more, softly, he read a verse from Housman.

    
Now, hollow fires burn out tonight
,

    
And lights are guttering low;

    
Square your shoulders and lift your pack
,

    
And leave your friends and go
.

    
Don’t ever fear, lads, naught’s to dread

    
Look not left nor right;

    
In all the endless road you tread
,

    
There’s nothing but the night
.

“Whether the march begins at the gallows or when the gates of Joliet close upon them, there is nothing but the night,” said Darrow.

“None of us are unmindful of the public; courts are not, and juries are not,” Darrow told the judge. He was coming to the end. “I have stood here for three months as somebody might stand at the seacoast trying to sweep back the tide. I hope the seas are subsiding and the wind is falling and I believe they are. But I wish to make no false pretense to this court. The easy thing and the popular thing to do is to hang my clients. I know it.

“Men and women who do not think will applaud. The cruel and the thoughtless will approve,” he said.

Through the open windows came the muffled noise of the streetcars, and of passing automobiles. But inside the courtroom, the only sound was of Darrow’s voice. And now it was breaking.

“Your Honor stands between the future and the past,” he said. “I know the future is with me, and what I stand for here; not merely for the lives of these two unfortunate lads, but for all boys and all girls; all of
the young, and as far as possible, for all of the old. I am pleading for life, understanding, charity and kindness and the infinite mercy that forgives all. I am pleading that we overcome cruelty with kindness and hatred with love.

“I know the future is on my side,” he said, stretching his arms in supplication to the bench. “You may hang these boys; you may hang them by the neck til they are dead. But in doing it you will turn your face toward the past. In doing it you are making it harder for every other boy.”

Or “you may save them,” he told Caverly, “and it makes it easier for every child that some time may sit where these boys sit. It makes it easier for every human being with an aspiration and a vision and a hope and a fate.

“I am pleading for the future,” Darrow said. “I am pleading for a time when hatred and cruelty will not control the hearts of men. When we can learn by reason and judgment and understanding and faith that all life is worth saving, and that mercy is the highest attribute of man.”

He stood sorrowfully, wiping more tears from his eyes. It was almost four p.m. “I feel that I ought to apologize for the length of time I have taken. This may not be as important as I think it is, and I am sure I do not need to tell this court, or to tell my friend Mr. Crowe, that I would fight just as hard for the poor as for the rich.

“If I should succeed in saving these boys’ lives and do nothing for the progress of the law, I should feel sad, indeed. If I can succeed, my greatest award and my greatest hope and my greatest compensation will be that I have done something for the tens of thousands of other boys, for the other unfortunates who must tread the same way that these poor youths have trod, that I have done something to help human understanding, to temper justice with mercy, to overcome hate with love.