The Loeb-Leopold case - The Clarence Darrow Collection

The Loeb-Leopold Case
case, did not sentence him, but he waited for the
jury's verdict on Windreth, and they found him
guilty and sentenced him to death, and Judge
Horton followed that sentence. Had this case come
into that court on a plea of guilty, it probably
would have been different; perhaps not; but it
really was not a question of a plea of guilty; and
he was twenty-eight or thirty years old.
I might say in passing as to Judge Horton — he
is dead. I knew him very well. In some ways I
liked him. I tried a case for him after he had left
the bench. But I will say this: he was never noted
in Chicago for his kindness and his mercy, and any-
body who remembers knows that I am stating the
truth.
The next man who was hanged on a plea of guilty
was Daniel McCarthy, twenty-nine years old, in
1897, by Judge Stein. Well, he is dead. I am very
careful about being kind to the dead, so I will say
that he never knew what mercy was, at least while
he lived. Whether he does now, I cannot say. Still
he was a good lawyer. That was in 1897.
It was twenty-two years, your Honor, before any-
body else was hanged in Cook County on a plea of
guilty, old or young, twenty-two years before a
judge had either the old or young walk into his
court and throw himself on the mercy of the court
and get the rope for it. But twenty-two years later,
in 1 91 9, Thomas Fitzgerald, a man about forty
years old, was sentenced for killing a little girl, plead
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