The Loeb-Leopold case - The Clarence Darrow Collection

The Loeb-Leopold Case
but if it had been the proper training for him he
would not be in this court room today with the
noose above his head. If there is responsibility any-
where, it is back of him; somewhere in the infinite
number of his ancestors, or in his surroundings, or
in both.
We may have all the dreams and visions and build
all the castles we wish, but the castles of youth
should be discarded with youth, and when they
linger to the time when boys should think wiser
things, then it indicates a diseased mind. " When I
was young I thought as a child, I spoke as a child,
I understood as a child; but now I have put off
childish things," said the Psalmist twenty centuries
ago. It is when these dreams of boyhood, these
phantasies of youth still linger, and the growing boy
is still a child — a child in emotion, a child in feel-
ing, a child in hallucinations — that you can say
that it is the dreams and the hallucinations of child-
hood that are responsible for his conduct.
There is not an act in all this horrible tragedy that
was not the act of a child, the act of a child wandering
around in the morning of life, moved by the new
feelings of a boy, moved by the uncontrolled im-
pulses which his teaching was not strong enough to
take care of, moved by the dreams and the halluci-
nations which haunt the brain of a child. I say,
your Honor, that it would be the height of cruelty,
of injustice, of wrong and barbarism to visit the
penalty upon this boy.
173