Clarence Darrow

Clarence Seward Darrow 1922

Clarence Seward Darrow (born April 18, 1857 in Kinsman, Ohio , † March 13, 1938 in Chicago , Illinois ) was an American lawyer . He was also a leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union .

Darrow was known by several sensational processes, including through his defense of the young killers Leopold and Loeb in the process to the murder of 14-year-old Bobby Franks (1924) and by the defense of John T. Scopes in the so-called Scopes Trial in which he faced the famous prosecutor William Jennings Bryan . The acquittal for Ossian Sweet also became famous . Darrow was known for his sharp mind , compassion, and also agnosticism . He is considered one of the most famous American lawyers and civil rights activists .

Life

youth

Darrow was born to Amirus Darrow, a staunch abolitionist (opponent of slavery), and Emily Darrow, an early suffragette . He attended Allegheny College and then studied for a year at the University of Michigan Law .

From business lawyer to labor lawyer

Darrow began his career in Youngstown, Ohio, where he was admitted to the bar in 1878 . He later moved to Chicago , Illinois and soon started working as an in-house lawyer for a railroad company. In 1894, however, he switched sides and represented railway union leader Eugene V. Debs in the Pullman strike process. For this he even gave up his position as in-house counsel, although this meant a severe financial loss for him.

From labor lawyer to criminal defense attorney

Also in 1894, he began working as a criminal defense attorney and took on his first murder case. Patrick Eugene Prendergast had confessed to killing Chicago Mayor Carter Harrison Sr. Darrow pleaded insanity, but suffered defeat in court. Prendergast was executed that same year. For the vehement opponent of the death penalty, this remained the only one of around 50 murder trials in his career as a defense attorney that ended with the execution of a client. At the beginning of the 20th century, he was one of Chicago's most famous criminal defense lawyers.

The Bill Haywood case

Darrow had one of his most spectacular cases in 1907. In the 1890s, there had been militant clashes between mine owners and unions in the silver mines in northern Idaho, who were suspected of being, among others. a. to have carried out several bomb attacks. The mine owners were assisted by the democratic governor Frank Steunenburg (elected with the help of the trade unions), who had called in government troops and had over 1000 male residents of the cities controlled by the unions interned without trial. On December 30, 1905, Steunenburg was killed in a bomb attack in front of his house. After a note from a waitress, a certain Harry Orchard was arrested, who - after turning on the famous Pinkerton detective James MacParland - confessed to the bomb attack and other murders he claimed to have committed on behalf of the WFM union . WFM Secretary and Treasurer William Dudley Haywood , President Charles Moyer, and Advisor George Pettibone were then arrested in Denver under strict secrecy (but with the approval of the Governor of Colorado) and taken to Idaho. At first, the union attorney Edmund Richardson tried to attack the legality of the arrest, but failed even before the Supreme Court (December 1906, Pettibone vs. Nichols, with only one vote against) - use of force by the state would not be an obstacle to an indictment. This has now been prepared by two of Idaho's most famous lawyers, the future Senator William Borah, who also had the largest law firm in Idaho, and the experienced prosecutor James Hawley. The place of the trial was Boise .

The defense of William Dudley Haywood, who was charged first, now brought Clarence Darrow to the defense team, who initially managed to turn around a witness for the prosecution from the ranks of the trade unions, who was himself charged with the bombings - Darrow even achieved it a jury blockade during his trial - so that Orchard was again the only witness for the prosecution. The jury selection (from May 1907) for the sensational process alone took six weeks. First, Richardson Orchard cross-examined 26 hours without being able to particularly shake his testimony. The defense then called over 100 witnesses to refute details of Orchard's testimony. William Haywood himself cut a fine figure on the stand and did not allow himself to be disturbed by Borah's five-hour cross-examination. In his eleven-hour defense speech, which according to press reports, moved the women present to tears in places, Darrow portrayed Orchard as a liar and broke a lance for the unions. On July 29th, Haywood was acquitted after 20 hours of deliberation by the jury. Pettibone was also acquitted, and the trial against the third party was not even opened. Orchard was sentenced to death for the governor's murder, which was then commuted to life imprisonment. The trial also marked the end of the brutal “class struggle” in the Idaho mining area on both sides.

The case of the McNamara brothers

Darrow's next major case involved the McNamara brothers, who were charged with bombing the Los Angeles Times building in October 1911, killing 20. At the time, some unions carried out numerous bomb attacks to force employers to the negotiating table. The editor of the newspaper was vehemently against the union. Darrow knew from the outset that his clients were guilty and planned to turn the case into a "Cause Celébre" of the workers' struggle against oppression. However, when one of his associates was seen giving bribes to a jury member while Darrow was in sight of the action, he was forced to plead guilty. At least he could avoid the death penalty for his clients; the McNamara brothers were only sentenced to imprisonment.

The attempts at bribery had long judicial consequences. In a first trial he was acquitted - defended by the famous lawyer Earl Rogers - in the second, when he defended himself, he succeeded in preventing the jury from reaching a decision. But he had to promise never to practice as a lawyer in California again. Another consequence of the charges was that he was removed from the list of union defense lawyers, so that he henceforth focused on criminal law.

Leopold and Loeb

Clarence Darrow

In 1924 Darrow took over the Leopold and Loeb case . Both were highly intelligent students on charges of kidnapping and murdering 14-year-old boy Bobby Franks. At the time of the crime, they were 18 or 19 years old and therefore still minors. The only motive for the act was the ambition of the two students to commit the perfect murder. Darrow convinced his clients to plead guilty in order to prevent a jury from reaching a decision that, in the heated public atmosphere, would probably have been to the detriment of his clients. Due to the confession of guilt, the judgment was passed by the judge alone. Before this, Darrow argued in a plea lasting several days, which is considered to be one of the best of his career. Previously, numerous defense psychiatrists had been heard, who also brought Sigmund Freud's theories to the American public. The process received extraordinary public attention across the country. Darrow's only goal had been to prevent the death penalty, which he eventually achieved. Darrow was a staunch and committed opponent of the death penalty. However, the judge said in the reasons for the verdict, for which he allowed himself ten days, that the psychiatrists' arguments had hardly impressed him, he just did not want to set a precedent for the death penalty for young people.

The crime inspired writers and directors to artistic processing. B. Patrick Hamilton in his novel Rope . This was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock under the same name (in German: Cocktail für eine Leiche ) in 1948.

After the trial, rumors circulated that he had received a million dollars for successfully defending him. Darrow tried to counteract the negative public reputation by announcing that he would let a committee of other lawyers determine his claims. In the end, instead of the requested 200,000, he received only $ 70,000, of which only $ 30,000 remained after taxes and expenses.

The Scopes Process

In 1925, schoolteacher John Thomas Scopes (immigrated from New York) in Dayton , Tennessee , was charged with teaching Darwin's evolutionary teachings in school, contrary to the Butler Act of March 13, 1925. That law prohibited Tennessee public schools from teaching theories that "deny the story of the divine creation of man as taught in the Bible and teach instead that man is descended from animals." In fact, the law would have allowed teaching the evolution of other animals and plants. Because of the special role of the Descent of Man, the process also received its name in the public " monkey trial " (Monkey Trial). The case had been constructed to attack the law, and in that sense the testimony of the students had been influenced by Scopes. Whether Scopes really ever taught the descent of humans from apes in school is controversial. Darrow joined the defense team even though he had actually announced his retirement by then.

For formal reasons, both sides were not interested in a position and wanted the rhetorical argument in front of the numerous press (the reports by Henry L. Mencken became famous ) and the thousands of spectators who flocked to the small town. The climax of the trial was when Darrow called the opposing attorney William Jennings Bryan , a politician best known for his fundamentalist speeches, to the stand as an expert on the Bible. This accepted despite protests from the other public prosecutors. The subsequent cross-examination of Darrow, in which he managed to corner and ridicule Bryan, went down in history. Due to the large number of spectators, the hearing was moved outside. After two hours, Judge John T. Raulston interrupted and the next day ordered that the testimony be struck off the record as it would be irrelevant to the judgment (the jury was not present during the questioning anyway). As a coup de grace, Darrow made his client plead guilty so that Bryan was deprived of the opportunity to deliver his carefully prepared closing speech - he passed away shortly after this greatest humiliation of his career. Scopes was sentenced on July 10, 1925, but only to pay the minimal fine of $ 100. A year later, the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned the verdict on a formality (the jury should have determined the amount of the sentence), but otherwise did not reassign the case to the lower courts, as nothing from the extension of such a bizarre case would win (so the court). In addition, Scopes was no longer teaching in Tennessee.

The case of Dr. Ossian Sweet

The Ossian H. Sweet House in Detroit

Also in 1925, Darrow took on the Dr. Ossian Sweet . In Detroit, a white mob had tried to evict a black family of doctors who had bought and moved into a house in a predominantly white neighborhood days earlier. Friends and relatives of the family gathered there in anticipation of rioting. Henry Sweet, Ossian's brother, opened fire with a rifle he had brought with him, one man, Leon Breiner, died, and another, Eric Houghberg, was wounded. Sweet and his aides were arrested and taken to prison, including Dr. Ossian Sweet and three members of his family. The class action initially ended with the defendants invoking self-defense and the (all-white) jury initially declaring that it was undecided. Darrow argued that if blacks attacked a white man's house, it would not even have been charged. Then the trial was restarted, each of the defendants being tried individually, first against Dr. Ossian's brother Henry, who had admitted his involvement in the shooting. Darrow and his co-defense attorney Thomas Chawke obtained an acquittal for Henry, after which the prosecution dropped the charges against the remainder.

Debate with Chesterton

January 1931 the agnostic Darrow led a debate with the famous Catholic English writer GK Chesterton in Mecca Temple in New York City on the topic "Will the world return to religion?" . The audience vote after the debate, of which no transcript exists, was 1,022 votes for Darrow and 2,359 votes for Chesterton.

The Massie Trial

After the Scopes and Sweet cases, Darrow retired and only occasionally took on cases such as the Massie Trial in Hawaii in 1932. Thomas Massie, Grace Fortescue and two other men were charged with murdering Joseph Kahahawai with four other Hawaiians had previously been accused of raping and beating Massie's wife and Fortescue's daughter, Thalia Massie. The 1931 trial of Kahahawai ended with the indecision of the jury. The men were later found innocent, the wife invented rape, and the enraged relatives murdered Kahahawai, but were found by the police to transport the body. Darrow pleaded innocent on the basis of violated honor in the racist case. The process achieved a high level of publicity and the closing arguments were even broadcast on the radio on the mainland of the United States. The jury unanimously came to a “guilty” decision, but not for murder, but for manslaughter.

influence

After the death of Darrow Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee wrote a play that as Inherit the Wind ( original title : Inherit the Wind , Inherits the Wind ) with Spencer Tracy (as Henry Drummond, based on Darrow) and Fredric March as bigoted prosecutor Brady (equivalent to Bryan) was filmed, but only loosely portrays the circumstances of the Scopes trial. The authors' main intent was an attack on the McCarthy era . In 1991 the film Darrow was shot about him, with Kevin Spacey in the lead role.

Irving Stone wrote a biography of Clarence Darrow for the Defense . The novel Compulsion of Meyer Levin (1956) describes the Leopold / Loew Case, Kevin Boyle's Arc of Justice (2004) the Ossian Sweet case.

The lyricist Edgar Lee Masters ( Spoon River Anthology ) was temporarily in Darrow's office.

Darrow's written papers can be found in the Library of Congress in Washington, DC ; the largest collection of his letters is in the Riesenfeld Rare Books Research Center at the University of Minnesota Law School , but they are not publicly available.

David W. Rintels has - based on Irving Stone's biography - about Darrow a one-person play entitled "Clarence Darrow" (German: "In Doubt for the Defendant") written on March 26, 1974 with Henry Fonda premiered in the title role and was also recorded for television. With German translations of the piece, for example, Curd Jürgens , whose version was also recorded for television, Hans-Joachim Kulenkampff and Christian Kohlund celebrated great successes.

literature

• Geoffrey Cowan The People vs. Clarence Darrow
• Phyllis Vine One man's castle: Clarence Darrow in Defense of the American dream 2004
• Willard D. Hunsberger (Ed.) Clarence Darrow: A bibliography 1981
• Arthur Weinberg (Ed.) Advocate of the Damned: Clarence Darrow's Most Famous Pleadings, 1963
• Darrow Persian Pearl
• Darrow The Story of My Life
• Darrow Farmington , Chicago 1903 (childhood memories)
• Darrow Resist Not Evil

Web links

• The Clarence Darrow Home Page
• Closing remarks of Darrow's two-hour speech in the Leopold and Loew case (English)

Notes and sources

1. ↑ J. Anthony Lukas "The big trouble" 1997 (about the Haywood case, it won the Pulitzer Prize, but the author committed suicide first)
2. ↑ Adela Rogers St John's Final Verdict , Doubleday 1962
3. ^ Weinberg (Ed.) Attorney for the Damned , Simon and Schuster 1957, p. 17
4. ^ But eyewitness accounts like that of Henry Hazlitt in "The Nation", February 4, 1931
5. ↑ The recording of the play "Clarence Darrow" in the Internet Movie Database (English)
6. ^ Colossus on feet of clay, Der Spiegel, December 8, 1975, accessed on June 9, 2017
7. ↑ The recording of the play "In Doubt for the Accused" in the Internet Movie Database (English)
8. ^ Report on Kulenkampff's tour on www.zuschauerpost.de
9. ^ Report on the performance in the archive of the comedy on Kurfürstendamm , accessed on June 9, 2017
10. ↑ Successful character study - KOMÖDIE AM KURFÜRSTENDAMM - Christian Kohlund back with "In doubt for the accused" , Berliner Zeitung of January 25, 2008, accessed on June 9, 2017