The Loeb-Leopold case - The Clarence Darrow Collection

The Loeb-Leopold Case
thing because something hurt it ; the punishment of
the savage; if a person is injured in the tribe, they
must injure somebody in the other tribe; if one is
killed his friends or family must kill in return.
You can trace it all down through the history of
man. You can trace the burnings, the boilings, the
drawings and quarterings, the hanging of people in
England at the crossroads, carving them up and
hanging them as examples for all to see.
We can come down to the last century when
nearly two hundred crimes were punishable by
death, and by death in every form; not only hanging
— that was too humane — but burning, boiling, cut-
ting into pieces, torturing in all conceivable forms.
You can read the stories of the hangings on a
high hill, and the populace for miles around coming
out to the scene, that everybody might be awed
into goodness. Hanging for picking pockets — and
more pockets were picked in the crowd that went to
the hanging than had been known before. Hangings
for murder — and men were murdered on the way
there and on the way home. Hangings for poach-
ing, hangings for everything, and hangings in public,
not shut up cruelly and brutally in a jail, out of
the light of day, wakened in the nighttime and led
forth and killed, but taken to the shire town on a
high hill, in the presence of a multitude, so that all
might see that the wages of sin were death.
What happened? I have read the life of Lord
Shaftesbury, a great nobleman of England, who
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