Page:The plea of Clarence Darrow, August 22nd, 23rd & 25th, MCMXXIII, in defense of Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold, Jr., on trial for murder.djvu/114

 If there is any virtue in hanging, that was the logical way, because you cannot awe men into goodness unless they know about the hanging. We have not grown better than the ancients. We have grown more squeamish; we do not like to look at it; that is all. They hanged them at seven years; they hanged them again at eleven and fourteen.

We have raised the age of hanging. We have raised it by the humanity of courts, by the understanding of courts, by the progress in science which at last is reaching the law; and in ninety men hanged in Illinois from its beginning, not one single person under twenty-three was ever hanged upon a plea of guilty—not one. If your Honor should do this, you would violate every precedent that had been set in Illinois for almost a century. There can be no excuse for it, and no justification for it, because this is the policy of the law which is rooted in the feelings of humanity, which are deep in every human being that thinks and feels. There have been two or three cases where juries have convicted boys younger than this, and where courts on convictions have refused to set aside the sentence because a jury had found it.

First, I want to call your attention, your Honor, to the cases on pleas of guilty in the State of Illinois. Back of the year 1896 the record does not show ages. After that, which is the large part, probably sixty out of ninety—all show the age. Not the age at which they are hanged, as my friend Marshall thought, but the age at the time of the verdict or sentence as is found today.

In all the history of Illinois—I am not absolutely certain of it back of 1896, but there are so many of them that I know about from the books and otherwise, that I feel I am safe in saying there is no exception to the rule — but since 1896 everyone is recorded. The first