The Loeb-Leopold case - The Clarence Darrow Collection

The Loeb-Leopold Case
the poor boy, but I guarantee that it was not the best
lawyers at the bar, but doubtless a good lawyer
prosecuted him, and when he was convicted the
court said that he had rested his fate with the jury,
and he would not disturb the verdict.
I do not know whether your Honor, humane and
considerate as I believe you to be, would have dis-
turbed a jury's verdict in this case, but I know that
no judge in Cook County ever himself upon a plea
of guilty passed judgment of death in a case below
the age of twenty-three, and only one at the age of
twenty-three was ever hanged on a plea of guilty.
Viani I have looked up, and I don't care who did
it or how it was done, it was a shame and disgrace
that an eighteen-year-old boy should be hanged, in
1920, or a nineteen-year-old boy should be hanged,
in 1920, and I am assuming it is all right to hang
somebody, which it is not.
There were various things working against him.
Most anything might have happened after the war,
which I will speak of later, and not much later, for
I am to close tonight. There was a band of Italian
desperadoes, so-called. I don't know. Sam Car-
dinelli was the leader, a man forty years of age.
But their records were very bad. This boy should
have been singled out from the rest. If I had been
defending him, and he had not been, I never would
have come into court again. But he was not. He
was tried with the rest. I have looked up the
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