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/116

 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 anybody 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 anybody 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; and a great many men have been tried for murder, and a great many men have been executed, and a great many men have plead guilty and have been sentenced, either to a term of years or life imprisonment, over three hundred in that twenty-two years, and no man, old or young, was executed.

But twenty-two years later, in 1919, Thomas Fitzgerald, a man about forty years old, was sentenced for killing a little girl, plead guilty before my friend Judge Crowe, and he was put to death. And that is all. In the history of Cook County that is all that have been put to death on a plea of guilty. That is all.

Your Honor, what excuse could you possibly have for putting these boys to death'? You would have to turn your back on every precedent of the past. You would have to turn your back on the progress of the world. You would have to ignore all human sentiment and