Two wealthy, intelligent young scions of society. The senseless murder of a young boy. Society's cry for blood vengeance. An attorney whose entire career had been based on defending the poor and working-class.
These elements combined in 1924 to produce what remains one of the most audacious and prescient legal defenses in our history. Clarence Darrow's successful battle to save Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb from the hangman was a brilliant combination of scientific examination of the behavior of children with diseased minds and moral condemnation of the death penalty. It was also an example of what can happen when an intelligent and enlightened truth speaks to power.
Clarence Darrow, considered by many the greatest litigator who ever lived, started his career as corporate counsel for the Chicago and Northwestern Railway, but left that job in a couple of years to represent Socialist labor leader Eugene V. Debs who was being prosecuted for his role in the historic strike of Pullman Company workers. Darrow's career as a specialist in the defense of labor leaders ended abruptly in 1911, with his involvement in the McNamara case. James and John McNamara, two popular labor organizers, were accused of bombing the Los Angeles Times building, owned by the virulently anti-union Harrison Gray Otis. The bombing killed 21 people. The labor movement believed the brothers to be the innocent victims of anti-union capitalists, but Darrow knew that the evidence against them was very strong. After an aborted trial (which led to Darrow's subsequently being prosecuted for jury bribery), Darrow pled the McNamara brothers guilty in return for life sentences rather than execution. The labor movement was furious, and Darrow was no longer the lawyer of choice for union leaders. Darrow thereafter concentrated on criminal defense, particularly in the defense of those charged with capital crimes.
Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were the intelligent sons of wealthy men. Both were students at the University of Chicago in 1924, when Leopold was 19 and Loeb 18. They became fascinated by the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, who postulated the ability of men to become superhuman, and thus beyond concepts of good and evil and subject to different moral imperatives than weaker humans. Their intellectual prowess did not prevent Leopold and Loeb from falling into the adolescent trap of seeing the world in overly concrete terms. Thus, they believed that they were the "supermen" of Nietzche's philosophy, and thus above ordinary moral considerations. To prove this to themselves (and, more importantly, to each other), they kidnapped and murdered Bobby Franks, the 14-year old son of a wealthy neighbor. They then sent a ransom note to the Franks family.
The crime quickly unraveled, as Bobby's body was found shortly after the murder, along with a unique pair of eyeglasses which was almost immediately traced to Nathan Leopold. Upon questioning, the boys first told stories that were rapidly disproved. They then confessed, each accusing the other of striking the fatal blows on their victim.
The media coverage of the investigation and subsequent trial was a precursor to the sensationalist rabble-rousing that so often passes for journalism today. The press howled for the boys' blood, helped the prosecution track down evidence, and, when the families hired Clarence Darrow to represent the defendants, screeched about the use of high-priced legal talent (Darrow responded by proposing that his fee be set by officers of the Chicago Bar Association).
Darrow made three key moves during the trial, one of which was unprecedented and all of which were monumentally daring. The first was pleading the boys guilty to murder and waiving jury for penalty determination. Darrow thus narrowed the trial down to the only real issue, the reason for the crime, and put the responsibility into the hands of one (hopefully) cool-headed jurist rather than twelve people who had been virtually bathed in the hostile media coverage of the previous months.
The second was resting his penalty phase argument on psychiatric evidence. The science of psychiatry was relatively young in 1924 (indeed Darrow sought out Sigmund Freud for assistance, but Freud's ill health prevented him from travelling to the United States). The prosecution asserted that psychiatric evidence was not relevant to the issue of whether Leopold and Loeb should live or die, as they were not claiming to have been insane at the time of the crime. However, Darrow successfully argued that evidence that established that the boys' actions were not due to the blackness of their souls, but to the combination of their youth, psychiatric issues, and vulnerability to Nietzchean influences was indeed pertinent to deciding whether they should be killed. The ensuing month-long hearing was a milestone in forensic efforts to explain unexplainable behavior.
The third key move was Darrow's 12 hour summation, almost universally recognized as the greatest closing argument ever given. In it, he articulated brilliantly that the most heinous of crimes occur for reasons, most of which are beyond the knowledge and/or control of the perpetrator:
"Science has been at work, humanity has been at work, scholarship has been at work, and intelligent people now know that every human being is the product of endless heredity behind him and the infinite environment around him. He is made as he is and he is the sport of all that goes before him and is applied to him, and under the same stress and storm, you would act one way and I act another and poor Dickey Loeb another."
And he made as beautiful an argument against capital punishment as has ever been voiced:
"Mr. Savage, [the prosecutor] with the immaturity of youth and inexperience, says that if we hang them there will be no more killing. This world has been one long slaughterhouse from the beginning until today, and killing goes on and on and on, and will forever. Why not read something, why not study something, why not think instead of blindly shouting for death?...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. It will be easy today, but in Chicago and reaching out over the length and breadth of the land, more and more fathers and mothers, the humane, the kind, and the hopeful, who are gaining an understanding and asking questions, not just about these poor boys but about their own, these will join in no acclaim at the death of my clients."
Darrow's litigation, and his argument, were decades ahead of their time. It was not until the case of Gregg v. Georgia, in 1976, that the United States Supreme Court recognized that the death penalty cannot be fairly administered without the sentencing jury being given information about the perpetrator as well as about the crime. The American Bar Association now advocates exactly the kind of investigation and presentation of capital cases that Darrow employed in 1924. Every day, advancements in medical and psychiatric science show us that our thoughts, reactions, and behaviors are influenced by a panoply of factors, including heredity, childhood influences, and environment, and that thus Darrow was right.
On the other hand, we as a nation still have not reached the level of enlightenment on the issue of the death penalty demonstrated in Darrow's summation. A great many of us still "blindly shout for death," especially when the media tells us to. We still think that the ritualistic taking of life is moral. We still would rather satisfy our blood-lust for vengeance than recognize, as did Darrow, that the notion that evil behavior is due solely to an evil soul is childishly and falsely simplistic.
Postscript: Richard Loeb was killed in prison by a fellow inmate in 1936. Nathan Leopold was voluntarily infected with malaria as part of a medical study, and learned 27 languages, while in prison. He was released in 1958, after serving 33 years, and moved to Puerto Rico, where he worked as a hospital laboratory assistant. He died in 1971.