For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Jazz Age Chicago (22 page)

Section 285 of the Illinois criminal code specified that if a defendant, after judgment and before execution of sentence, should become insane, the court should postpone execution until the defendant had recovered his sanity. Prendergast had become insane, Darrow argued, subsequent to his conviction, and the court should send him to an asylum until he regained his sanity.
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So, although, in the original trial, the jury had disregarded the claim of the defense that Prendergast was insane, it seemed that the assassin would have a second opportunity to escape the noose. It was, according to Levy Mayer, a leader of the Chicago bar, an ominous development that threatened to subvert the foundations of criminal justice in Cook County. If Darrow succeeded in winning a second trial in a lower court after the state supreme court had refused to issue a supersedeas to stay the original judgment, would it not mean that a lower court might annul the decision of the higher court? “The only plea of Prendergast,” Mayer remarked to the newspapers, “on his trial was that of insanity. Upon that defense the jury found against him. The court rendered judgment and the Supreme Court concurred…. Another inquiry as to his sanity is simply an appeal to a lower court from a conviction which has already been confirmed by the highest court…. Thoughtful men will consider the precedent thus established with considerable alarm. It adds another to the already too numerous technicalities and obstacles in the way of a prompt and speedy enforcement of the criminal law.”
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In a more general sense, such critics argued that Darrow’s ingenuity threatened to bring the law itself into disrepute. The novelty of the tactic, its application in such a prominent case, and the unfortunate precedent that it would create—all contributed to the public vilification of Darrow as a trickster who would use a loophole in the legal code to postpone judgment indefinitely and thus deny justice. Clever lawyers had already burdened the legal system with technicalities founded on recondite passages in the criminal code—if Darrow now succeeded in saving Prendergast’s life by claiming that his client had become insane after sentence had been passed, would not the same tactic be used generally in the Chicago courts to prevent the execution of murderers?

Darrow succeeded in winning a second trial, but he failed to save Prendergast’s life. Medical experts testified, again, that Prendergast was a paranoiac; but the jury, after deliberating for ten days, decided that the defendant had the ability to distinguish right from wrong—thus, in a legal sense at least, he was sane. The case had run its course. Neither the state supreme court nor the governor of Illinois responded to petitions from the defense, and on Friday, 13 July 1894, the hangman pulled the trap of the gallows to end Prendergast’s life.

T
HE CASE HAD ENDED BADLY
for the prisoner, but for Darrow it had brought a first taste of fame. Some critics viewed Darrow’s role as ill judged: he had applied an obscure statute to prolong the life of an assassin who had willfully murdered the mayor of Chicago. Darrow seemed, in this telling, the epitome of the shyster lawyer, concerned less with truth and justice than with abetting an infamous criminal. Other commentators, more sensitive to the constitutional safeguards that ensured due process of the law, commended Darrow for an astute and resourceful defense of his client. The state legislature had provided for the insanity defense when it had revised the Illinois criminal code in 1845; surely no reproof should attach to a lawyer who used the statutes to defend his client.

It never troubled Darrow that he might be accused of manipulating the law in the attempt to save Prendergast from the scaffold. Perhaps he had exploited a loophole in the criminal code—but so what? Was a lawyer not supposed to seek out every possible advantage and use it to the maximum effect to rescue his client? Any attorney who failed to use such tactics, Darrow believed, was remiss in fulfilling his obligation to pursue every possible defense.

And although he had failed, in this case, to save his client, his effort had contributed, nevertheless, to the campaign against the death penalty.

Prendergast’s defense was one of many such cases against capital punishment that Darrow undertook—with little prospect of financial reward—in the course of his long career. Typically the defendant would be the author of a heinous crime committed in bizarre circumstances; he customarily suffered from mental illness and failed to comprehend the gravity of the crime. Such clients had limited resources and few friends; they were vulnerable and alone; and from the moment of their arrest they were marked for the scaffold.

Such cases, Darrow believed, illustrated the injustice of capital punishment. The death penalty was born out of hatred toward the criminal. It had no purpose except revenge. There was no evidence that capital punishment was a deterrent to murder. Indeed, Darrow argued, since the taking of a life was an act of violence that corroded sentiments of charity and respect toward one’s fellows, it followed that the death penalty cheapened and devalued human life and that it was more an inducement to murder than a deterrent.

If hanging the murderer was meant to serve as a deterrent, why not carry out executions in public before the largest possible audience? How could hanging serve to deter if it was hidden away, unseen, in a private chamber? And, of course, the death penalty was irrevocable—there could be no reversal. It was a punishment that in its certitude allowed for no mistakes or errors of judgment on the part of the court.

I
N HIS OLD AGE,
when writing his autobiography, Darrow could recall those occasions when his father, Amirus, had spoken, his voice suffused with regret, of his attendance at a public hanging. Amirus had been one of many hundreds of spectators at the event and he had played no other role in the proceedings, yet many years later, he confessed to his son his shame that he had witnessed the cold-blooded killing of another human being. Amirus’s abhorrence of capital punishment had had little impact on his son: as a young man, Clarence, living and working as a lawyer in Ashtabula, had accepted the conventional attitude toward criminality. Crime was the consequence of a deliberate choice on the part of the criminal to commit wrongdoing; it deserved, therefore, the appropriate punishment. Clarence Darrow’s belief that each individual exercised free will in choosing good or evil was unexceptional, at least in the small-town atmosphere of Ashtabula where his clients and acquaintances—farmers, businessmen, bankers, and tradesmen—also subscribed to the expectations of conventional morality.
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Everything changed for Darrow after he read John Peter Altgeld’s
Our Penal Machinery and Its Victims
. A neighbor, one of the local judges on the county court, had lent him the book, and Darrow had devoured it at a single sitting. Altgeld’s thesis, that crime is a consequence of social and economic pressures bearing down relentlessly on susceptible individuals, relied on a persuasive combination of statistics and rhetoric. Criminal behavior, according to
Our Penal Machinery
, was less a consequence of free will and deliberation and more a matter of education, upbringing, and environment. The majority of criminals—the overwhelming majority, Altgeld stressed—had grown up in circumstances of dire poverty, in families where one or both parents were absent, and without the benefits of education, schooling, or discipline. Many had never known their parents or had run away from home at an early age; they had drifted to the slum areas of the big cities and had taken up crime as a way to earn a living. Altgeld claimed to have examined the annual reports of all the major prisons in the United States and could assert authoritatively that criminals, almost all of whom had committed their first crime at an early age, are “the poor, the unfortunate, the young and neglected…. To a great extent, [they] are the victims of unfavorable environments. In short, our penal machinery seems to recruit its victims from among those who are fighting an unequal fight in the struggle for existence.”
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Altgeld’s work was as much a jeremiad against the destructive effects of the prison as a dissertation on the causes of crime. Nothing, Altgeld asserted, could be less capable of serving the purpose of rehabilitation than the penal system of the United States. The authorities treated all criminals alike, regardless of their age or the severity of their offense, incarcerating youthful delinquents together with hardened criminals. Conditions inside most prisons were squalid, degrading, and vicious; overcrowding was the rule, rather than the exception; the prisoner spent his or her time either in enforced idleness or in purposeless work; and the prison guards maintained discipline with sadism and brutality. There was, Altgeld concluded, little possibility that anyone would emerge rehabilitated from the penitentiary and little wonder that the rate of recidivism in the United States was so high.

Nothing that Clarence Darrow ever read, either before or since, had as great an impact on his thinking as
Our Penal Machinery
. His former belief that crime was a matter of choice, a willful act freely taken, was now replaced by its opposite, the conviction that environmental circumstances—poverty, unemployment, illiteracy—determined criminal behavior. Indeed Darrow went farther than Altgeld in his determinism. An individual, Darrow believed, could not choose not to commit crime if circumstances dictated otherwise—free will was an illusion and a chimera, and all that mattered was the environment within which an individual had been born and raised.

B
Y
1894, D
ARROW HAD ACHIEVED
renown within Cook County as a clever speaker and an astute lawyer. He had represented the Haymarket prisoners and had defended the assassin of the mayor—his reputation within Cook County as the champion of the weak and defenseless seemed secure. But beyond Chicago, he remained unknown; few people elsewhere, in other parts of the country, recognized his name.

That would soon change: Darrow would quickly become the most famous lawyer in the United States, with a national, and even an international, reputation as a brilliantly resourceful advocate of the rights of labor and the workingman.

Darrow’s fame would rest on two pillars: his knowledge of the law and his ability as a public speaker. The first would earn him his reputation within the legal community; the second would win him a degree of recognition unmatched by that of any other lawyer in the country.

Among the lawyers of the Chicago bar, few were as ingenious or as skillful as Clarence Darrow. He was a resourceful attorney whose detailed knowledge of the Illinois criminal code enabled him to win courtroom battles even under the most improbable and adverse circumstances.

It was his skill as a tactician that earned Darrow a reputation among his peers as a formidable adversary, but it was his talent as an orator that brought him more general recognition. In the courtroom, Darrow always seemed to speak as though the cause of his client had become his own cause, and in his appeals to the jury he mixed reason and emotion in a powerful combination that rarely failed to persuade his listeners of the innocence of his client.

Darrow might face overwhelming odds; his case might seem hopeless; his client might seem sure to be convicted. But when Darrow turned to face the jury to begin his concluding speech, always in that low, gravelly voice that rumbled on and on—suddenly something magical would happen in the courtroom. Darrow’s eloquence, passion, and conviction would catch and hold his listeners; his emotion, always conveyed at a perfect pitch, would resonate with the jurymen so that they too could understand the justice, the rectitude, and the integrity of his appeal.

It happened again and again—it was as predictable as the summer sunshine and the winter snowstorms. No matter what the odds, Darrow always won his case. His client might be entirely despicable—a murderer and a rapist, perhaps, or a crooked politician, or, more prosaically, a brothel owner and a pimp—yet Darrow was sure to win the defendant the best possible outcome that the circumstances would allow.

I
T WAS THEREFORE NO SURPRISE
that Eugene Debs, the leader of the American Railway Union, would hire Darrow to defend him against conspiracy charges in connection with a boycott of the Pullman Car Works. Debs had established the American Railway Union in Chicago in 1893 to defend the wages and working conditions of railroad workers, and during its first year, the union had won strikes against the Union Pacific Railroad and then against the Great Northern Railroad.
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Flushed with success after vanquishing two of the most powerful railroad corporations in the country, Debs called his members to take action against the Pullman Car Works. The owner of the company, George Pullman, had refused to negotiate with his workers over a pay cut. They had come out on strike, and in June 1894, the American Railway Union, acting in sympathy with the Pullman workers, declared a boycott of all Pullman cars—no member of the union would handle a Pullman car or any train connected to a Pullman car.

It was a step too far—at least according to the General Managers’ Association, a powerful federation of twenty-four railroad corporations. The association, now intent on crushing the railroad union, protested to the federal authorities that the boycott was clearly illegal, since it would both obstruct interstate commerce and prevent delivery of the mails. Should the authorities not therefore take action against Debs and his followers?

On 3 July 1894, the United States District Court issued an injunction against the American Railway Union. Debs responded by calling for a general strike against the railroad corporations, and one week later the authorities arrested Debs on charges of conspiring to obstruct interstate commerce and to prevent delivery of the mails.
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When the case came to court in January 1895, Clarence Darrow was ready with his defense. The prosecution accused Debs of conspiracy, yet, Darrow explained, no one had been indicted for carrying out the acts that Debs had allegedly conspired to bring about! The real conspiracy, Darrow alleged, was between George Pullman, owner of the Pullman Car Works; and the General Managers’ Association: a conspiracy to pressure federal authorities to press charges against Debs in order to break the back of the union. He would, Darrow announced to the court, ask for a subpoena for George Pullman to appear in court to testify about his relationship with the railroad corporations and the federal authorities.