The Loeb-Leopold case - The Clarence Darrow Collection

The Loeb-Leopold Case
go on saying, " Hang the unfortunates, and it will
end." Was there ever a murder without a cause?
And yet all punishment proceeds upon the theory
that there is no cause; and the only way to treat
crime is to intimidate every one into goodness and
obedience to law.
Crime has its cause. Perhaps all crimes do not
have the same cause, but they all have some cause.
And people today are seeking to find out the cause.
Scientists are studying it; criminologists are inves-
tigating it; but we lawyers go on and on and on,
punishing and hanging and thinking that by general
terror we can stamp out crime.
If a doctor were called on to treat typhoid fever
he would probably try to find out what kind of milk
or water the patient drank, and perhaps clean out
the well so that no one else could get typhoid from
the same source. But if a lawyer were called on to
treat a typhoid patient, he would give him thirty
days in jail, and then he would think that nobody
else would ever dare to take it. If the patient got
well in fifteen days, he would be kept until his time
was up; if the disease was worse at the end of thirty
days, the patient would be released because his time
was out. As a rule, lawyers are not scientists.
Still, we are making some progress. Courts give
attention to some things that they did not give at-
tention to before. Once in England they hanged
children seven years of age; not necessarily hanged
them, because hanging was never meant for punish-
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