The Loeb-Leopold case - The Clarence Darrow Collection

The Loeb-Leopold Case
dence of mental disease. The absurdity of such a
position is apparent.
In the first place, if your Honor please, these boys
are not claimed by the defense to be stupid. There
is no claim made that they do not know how to
reason, nor that they have not good memory. There
is no claim made that they don't know where they
are. They know things occur; they know they are
being tried on a plea of guilty as to the question of
punishment. They have intelligence.
The evidence is that because of their superior
intellects, because they progressed at an unusually
great rate of speed, and on account of the slow de-
velopment of their emotional life, a split in the per-
sonality of these boys has occurred.
That is, as respects Nathan Leopold, Jr., we have
an individual whose powers of reasoning are intact,
which is one of the peculiarities of a paranoid
personality.
A paranoid personality, to begin with, must be a
person of superior intellect. He must be a person
who is capable of reasoning well. The only trouble
with his logic is, he starts with the wrong premise,
and that is what makes him a paranoiac. Usually
he has delusions of grandeur; he has delusions that
he is greater than anybody else. He identifies him-
self with some great religious character, with some
king, or with some potentate, or with Christ, or with
God. And as far back as October, 1923, Leopold
was talking about the superman.
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