Darrow's defense of Nathan Leopold, Jr. (left), and Richard Loeb (right) enraged the country.

CLARENCE DARROW

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he began defending penniless men accused of murder. Rarely did he attempt to convert the courtroom merely to the innocence of his client but rather to a more tolerant point of view.

He did not seek victims of injustice and suffering; they came to him-the old, the poor, the ignorant. He saved 220 men from the death penalty.

The culminating irony of Clarence Darrow's long life, during which he who had fought for the philosophy that crime stemmed from poverty, came when he was called upon to defend the two sons 'of multimillionaires who had committed t the most. brutal and senseless murder of their age.

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The Darrows were asleep in the early morning of a day in 1924 when they were awakened by a frightening ring of the doorbell. Into the flat rushed the relatives of “Dickie" Loeb and Nathan Leopold, Jr., to cry out that Loeb and Leopold, both under 21, had just confessed to the murder of 14-year-old Robert Franks.

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The boys, brilliant university students, had tried to plan a perfect murder for the thrill of being superior to all investigation. They had beaten young Franks to death with a chisel, and stuffed his body into a culvert. There was evidence that Loeb and Leopold had been guilty of a homosexual relationship, and there was a suspicion that the Franks boy had been murdered because he had resisted their acts of perversion.

"Save their lives!” cried their relatives. "Get them a life sentence instead of a death sentence. That's all we ask of you!"

“That's all you ask,” whispered the now 67-yearold Darrow. "Millions of people will demand their death, and all you ask is that I save their üives!”

Did he

id he want to bring the wrath of the public down on his head again? To be called an anarchist, an enemy of society? Yet, if he defended these young men against execution he would have the ears of the world for the expounding of his teachings against capital punishment.

He took the case and again he was called "Traitor!" Many people believed he had taken it because he had been promised a million-dollar fee.

Darrow's defense of "Not guilty because mentally ill" enraged the country. But day by day, he provided the nation with an education in the working of the mind and its degree of responsibility.

“All crimes do not have the same cause, but they all have some cause," Darrow argued, “and people today are seeking to find out those causes. Scientists are studying criminologists are investigating. but we go on punishing and .. thinking that by general terror we can stamp out crime. You may hang these boys .. but in doing it you will turn your face toward the past... making it harder for every other boy who, in ignorance and darkness, must grope his way through the mazes which only childhood knows.”

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The judge acknowledged that the 'careful analysis made of the life history of the defendants was “a valuable contribution to criminology"--and sen-