Second City Sinners by Jon Seidel

Author:Jon Seidel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lyons Press
Published: 2019-07-10T00:00:00+00:00

The front page of the Chicago Daily News following the guilty pleas by Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. COURTESY OF SUN-TIMES MEDIA

The judge, impatient, complained as police struggled to clear the mob.

“You might as well have twenty wooden policemen out there if they don’t do what they are told,” he said.

A sergeant eventually told the judge that everyone was gone. Except “the press.”

“I can’t make them understand that you want them out of the hall,” a sergeant told the judge.

“Have they got press tickets?” the judge asked.

“Some of them have, but there is a runner out here who has not.”

“Let the press in,” the judge said. “They are entitled to come in and out.”

Finally, with the hallways cleared, Darrow began a speech that would last for days. He stood in a small space before the judge’s bar. His scant, long hair began to fly. His white tie hung limp. And his coat hung shapelessly over his bent shoulders.

Leopold blinked back tears and Loeb dug his fist into his eyes as their own defense attorney argued they should never be freed again. It was their best hope of avoiding the noose.

Darrow damned their deed. He sympathized with their humanity. And he mocked the notion that their execution would stop future killers.

“My God!” Darrow said. “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 calling for death?

“Kill them. Will that prevent other senseless boys or other vicious men or vicious women? No.”

Darrow told the judge that “no excessive use of money” went into the defense for Leopold and Loeb. And, laying the groundwork for a novel argument, Darrow said that “if we fail in this defense it will not be for lack of money. It will be on account of money.

“Money,” he said, “has been the most serious handicap that we have met.

“I insist, Your Honor, that had this been the case of two boys of this age, unconnected with families who are supposed to have great wealth, that there is not a state’s attorney in Illinois who would not at once have consented to a plea of guilty and a punishment in the penitentiary for life. Not one. No lawyer could have justified it. No prosecution could have justified it.”

Darrow said he could have won the argument under those circumstances, “no contest.”

But, he said, “we are here with the lives of two boys imperiled, with the public aroused. For what?

“Because, unfortunately, their parents have money. Nothing else.”

Darrow insisted that no human being in Illinois under the age of twenty-eight had been put to death after pleading guilty. Later, he said “some ninety human beings have been hanged in the history of Chicago, and of those only three have been hanged on the plea of guilty.”

Meanwhile, he argued that “Robert Franks is dead, and we cannot change that.” He suggested the boy’s suffering was minimal.

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