Clarence Darrow Verdicts Out of Court

Clarence Darrow was famous for being a defense attorney, a line of work that can provide for a range of interests in a society in which people who are ambitious never cease trying to make something new illegal. Darrow also wrote articles and gave talks on political issues of the day. VERDICTS OUT OF COURT collects items from 1895 to 1936, divides the items into seven subject areas, and includes an Introduction by Arthur and Lila Weinberg dated March, 1963, which praises Darrow for publicly representing "more cases for the weak and poor than any other lawyer in America," (p. 35) as Darrow himself put it, in a case in which he was charged with jury tampering in California. Mild contradictions abound in his life. He proclaimed that he was always for peace and love in his own case, but Germany offended his sensibilities so much by invading Belgium and France that he joined the popular opinion that "I am thoroughly convinced that not only was it right of America to enter this war, but it was her duty, if she recognizes duty, and that had she stayed out she would have been so cowardly that she would have received and deserved the contempt of all the right-thinking people of the world." (p. 343). Darrow's book, CRIME: ITS CAUSE AND TREATMENT, was published two years before he defended Leopold and Loeb, who were so young and rich that Darrow had to transfer his concern for the weak and poor to some who weren't. "In a terrible crisis there is only one element more helpless than the poor, and that is the rich." (p. 40). Americans in Chicago were sure they could legally do something terrible to young people who botch their first murder and kidnapping crime, but Darrow tried to make the court seem like it was giving them a fair deal. "After several weeks' deliberation Judge Caverly sentenced Leopold and Loeb to ninety-nine years plus life. Twelve years later, Loeb was killed in a prison fight. In March, 1958, on the twentieth anniversary of Darrow's death, a rehabilitated fifty-two-year-old Nathan Leopold was paroled from the state penitentiary at Joliet, Illinois." (p. 41). Some things have changed in the last hundred years, but the topics presented in this book hit some current interests. When he was invited to address the Sixth Annual Meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Washington, D.C., on April 20, 1928, he was told to abuse the newspapers and he said, "I can't do it adequately." (p. 401). This was before American bombers were famous in enemy countries for dropping bombs on television stations that dared to propagandize against whichever side the Americans were on, but he does a pretty good job of describing how nobody believes what they read in the press, but they don't know anything else anyway. "They know only one thing: get the public angry so they will kill somebody or increase the term of servitude. That resulted the other day in the state of Michigan sending a man to the penitentiary for life for having a