The Loeb-Leopold case - The Clarence Darrow Collection

The Loeb-Leopold Case
me that the brains of these boys are not diseased.
You need no experts, you need no X-rays ;
you need
no study of the endocrines. They get through South
Chicago, and they take the regular automobile road
down toward Hammond. There is the same situa-
tion; hundreds of machines; any accident might
encompass their ruin. They stop at the forks of
the road, and leave little Bobby Franks, soaked with
blood, in the machine, and get their dinner, and eat
it without an emotion or a qualm.
But we are told that they planned. Well, a maniac
plans; an idiot plans; an animal plans; any
brain that functions may plan; but their plans were
the diseased plans of the diseased mind.
And still, your Honor, on account of its weirdness
and its strangeness, and its advertising, we are forced
to fight. For what? Forced to plead to this court
that two boys, one eighteen and the other nineteen,
may be permitted to live in silence and solitude and
disgrace and spend all their days in the penitentiary.
I can not understand it, your Honor. It would
be past belief, excepting that to the four corners of
the earth the news of this weird act has been carried,
and the intellect has been stifled, and men
have been controlled by passions which should have
died centuries ago.
My friend Savage pictured to you the putting of
this dead boy in this culvert. Well, no one can
minutely describe any killing and not make it shock-
ing. It is shocking because we love life and because
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