The Loeb-Leopold case - The Clarence Darrow Collection

The Loeb-Leopold Case
records, and I find that he was in the position of
most of these unfortunates; he did not have a
lawyer.
Your Honor, the question of whether a man is
convicted or acquitted does not always depend on
the evidence or entirely on the judge or the jury.
The lawyer has something to do with it. And the
State always has — always has at least moderately
good lawyers. And the defendants have, if they can
get the money; and if they cannot, they have no-
body. Ed Raber, if I am rightly informed, prose-
cuted. He had a fine chance, this poor Italian boy,
tried with three or four others. And prosecuted by
one of the most relentless prosecutors Chicago has
ever known. This boy was defended by somebody
whose name I never heard, who was appointed by
the court.
Your Honor, if in this court a boy of eighteen and
a boy of nineteen should be hanged on a plea of
guilty, in violation of every precedent of the past, in
violation of the policy of the law to take care of the
young, in violation of the law that places boys in
reformatories instead of prisons, if your Honor in
violation of all that and in the face of all the past
should stand here in Chicago alone to hang a boy
on a plea of guilty, then we are turning our faces
backward toward the barbarism which once pos-
sessed the world. If your Honor can hang a boy at
eighteen, some other judge can hang him at seven-
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