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/120

 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 nobody. Viani, who was on trial with others for his life, had a lawyer appointed by the court. Ed Raber, if I am rightly informed, prosecuted. 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 all the progress that has been made and of the humanity that has been shown in the 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 possessed the world. If your Honor can hang a boy eighteen, some other judge can hang him at seventeen, or sixteen, or fourteen. Some day, if there is any such thing as progress in the world, if there is any spirit of humanity that is working in the hearts of men, some day men would look back upon this as a barbarous age which deliberately set itself in the way of progress, humanity and sympathy, and committed an unforgivable act.

Yet your Honor has been asked to hang, and I must refer here for a minute to something which I dislike to