He was the Lawyer of the Damned, a great defender, a champion of free thought who skewered literal interpretations of the Bible in the Scopes Monkey Trial, and a three-day speech that skewered two notorious young murderers. He was a master of courtroom argument and was able to save him from being hanged. He was a terror to businesses and a fighting friend to workers.
Clarence Darrow, the most famous trial lawyer of our time, inspired respectful biographies, stage plays, and performances by some of the greatest actors of the 20th century. As a lawyer for generations, he exemplified the courage to face long challenges and the noble practice of law in the service of social welfare. Defense lawyers still study his speeches like scripture.
In this series, Christopher Goffard revisits old crimes in and around Los Angeles, from the famous to the forgotten, the momentous to the obscure, and digs into the archives and memories of those who lived there.
But when the Chicago lawyer arrived in Los Angeles in 1911 to handle some of the country’s most high-profile criminal cases, his biggest case was more than a decade away. He risked his career and his freedom by narrowly escaping what became known as the “Horrible Night City.” It’s not entirely clear whether he deserves to avoid prison.
Darrow was in town on behalf of the McNamara brothers, union members accused of dynamiting the anti-union Los Angeles Times downtown building in October 1910, killing 21 people. Labor leaders had begged a reluctant Darrow to take legal action. There was a widespread belief that the brothers had been framed as a plot to taint the union’s cause.
Famed criminal lawyer Clarence Darrow pitched his case to a jury in a 1913 trial.
(Los Angeles Times)
Darrow knew better. The evidence against his client was overwhelming. He urged one of the McNamara brothers to plead guilty to the Times murder and the other to the other bombing. Darrow settled the case to save his client from hanging, he explained.
A trial for the so-called “crime of the century” never took place. Instead, it was Darrow himself who was put on trial. Charge: Bribery. His lead jury investigator, Bert Franklin, approached two potential jurors in the McNamara case and offered them cash to vote not guilty.
Just before the plea deal was finalized, detectives arrested Franklin at the corner of Third Avenue and Main Street as he attempted to bribe juror George Lockwood, a Civil War veteran. Darrow’s claim that he knew nothing about it was overturned by an unexplained figure that appeared on the scene at that very moment.
Now, Franklin became a key witness against Darrow. So did John Harrington, the lead investigator for McNamara’s defense team, who claimed that Darrow showed him $10,000 in cash (well six figures in today’s dollars) to bribe the jury. According to Harrington’s testimony, when Franklin was captured, Darrow nervously blurted out: “Oh my god, if he talks I’m going to be destroyed.”
Mr. Darrow, who is in his mid-50s, appeared close to despair during the three-month trial. One reporter called him “brooding and stern.” “Frustrated, angry, heartbroken and trapped,” people said in the stifling heat of the courtroom. Lawyers salivated. Thousands of spectators crowded in to catch a glimpse.
As his representative, Darrow chose the colorful and intelligent Earl Rogers, who is believed to have been the inspiration for Perry Mason. Rogers vigorously cross-examined the prosecution’s witnesses, portraying him as a scoundrel who had lied about Darrow to protect himself.
A 1932 photo of attorney Clarence Darrow.
(Related news organizations)
But there was also damning testimony from a detective named Sam Brown, who recalled what Darrow said to him minutes after the failed bribery attempt. “If I had known what was going to happen, I never would have allowed it to happen,” Brown said.
Defense argument: Darrow had no motive to bribe the jury because the McNamara brothers had already planned to plead guilty. The trial focused on whether Darrow had finalized such a plan. (There was a good argument that the brothers were forced to plead because, as Justice McNamara put it, the disclosure of the bribery scheme “revealed the hopelessness of the defense.”)
In his summing up to the jury, prosecutor Joseph Ford essentially blamed Darrow for dynamizing the Times. “The example of a man like Darrow led poor, deluded JB McNamara to believe that he could safely commit the crimes he committed,” Ford said.
He evoked the pain of those who lost loved ones in the burning furnace of the Times building. he said, stretching his arms toward Darrow. “The widowed mother may turn to the defendant and say, ‘Give me my son back.'”
As Mr. Darrow took the stand to make his case to jurors, he called Mr. Ford’s attack “despicable and malicious in the extreme.” It was not suitable for humans, nor did it originate from humans. ”
Darrow’s statements to the jury should be understood that even if the jury believed him guilty, his motive was to provide a level playing field for vulnerable customers. It seemed to suggest that. He argued that the system is heavily skewed in favor of prosecutors. “They had a grand jury. They didn’t. They had a police force. They didn’t. They were forming a government. We didn’t.”
Would the greatest legal defender of our time be so foolish as to sanction such a dastardly bribery scheme? “I’m as qualified to bribe a jury as a Methodist preacher,” Mr. Darrow said. “If you 12 guys were to pick a spot a block away from my office and have a guy walk up to a street corner with money in his hand in broad daylight and hand over $4,000, I’m thinking. Then why convict me? I’m definitely in some state agency.”
Ms. Darrow claimed that she was criminally charged because of what she had advocated. “I’m not on trial for trying to bribe a man named Lockwood,” Darrow told jurors. “I am on trial because I am a lover of the poor, a friend of the oppressed, a longtime ally of working people, and a man who has been at the helm of the wrath of criminal interests in this country. That’s why I’m here, pursued by as cruel a gang as any man has ever been pursued, whether I’m guilty or innocent of the crime I’ve been charged with. That’s why I’m here.”
Darrow cried. The audience cried. The jurors cried. Even one of the prosecutors called it “one of the greatest speeches ever given in court,” but added, “It has little to do with his guilt or innocence.” Ta.
The jury deliberated for less than 40 minutes and Darrow was acquitted. However, early the following year, he was tried again, this time charged with attempting to bribe a second juror, a carpenter named Robert Bain. In this case, the defense of lack of motive was not available because the attempt occurred well before settlement negotiations began.
In March 1913, the jury deadlocked. Eight people voted guilty. The four men pleaded not guilty. Los Angeles prosecutors dropped the case, and two years after getting off the train in Los Angeles, a punished Darrow returned to Chicago.
“Everyone was tired of Darrow and just wanted him to get on a train and get out of town,” she wrote in her book, “Darrow’s Nightmare: Los Angeles 1911,” subtitled “The Forgotten.” Nelson C. Johnson, author of “-1913.” The story of America’s most famous trial lawyer. ”
Mr. Johnson, a former New Jersey judge, read Irving Stone’s “Clarence Darrow for the Defense” as a young man and drew inspiration from it as he pursued law.
When asked why Darrow was important to him, Johnson said: You’re gonna make me emotional. He added: “When you stand by your client when the worst happens to a fan, you know the outlook is very poor and you may end up not getting paid.” We also know that when you start representing a client, that person is putting their life in your hands and saying, “Please help me.” Sometimes a client shows up and you are their only friend. ”
This is what many lawyers still say about Clarence Darrow. It makes them emotional.
Nelson’s conclusion was that Darrow was “probably innocent.” The four jurors who sided with him in the second case saved him from historical obscurity.
“If he had been convicted, you and I wouldn’t be talking about him, and I wouldn’t have written that book,” Johnson said. “Once you’re a convicted felon, you can’t practice law in any state, even back then.”
Darrow’s most famous incident occurred after Los Angeles. In 1924, he was in his late 60s when he served as defense attorney for Chicago teenagers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, who murdered a 14-year-old boy to demonstrate their ability to commit the perfect crime. He persuaded the judge to spare their lives.
The following year, he defended a Tennessee schoolteacher named John Scopes who was accused of teaching the theory of evolution. The duel between the agnostic Darrow and the Biblical literalist William Jennings Bryan was the inspiration for the play Inherit the Wind. The following year, Darrow won an acquittal for a black man accused of firing into a white mob that surrounded his brother’s home in Detroit.
Jeffrey Cowan, a law professor at the University of Southern California, admired Darrow and helped found the Clarence Darrow Foundation, which funds public interest law. However, while researching his 1993 book, The People v. Clarence Darrow: The Bribery Trial of America’s Greatest Lawyer, Cowan concluded that the evidence against Darrow in the jury and bribery scheme was strong. Ta.
“I had complete faith in Darrow and went into this case confident that he was innocent,” Cowan told the Times. “I thought the fun part was being able to take the time to dig into why he was framed. That was my premise, but once I started investigating, I became convinced that he was guilty. It became.”
Many of Darrow’s friends and confidants believed he was behind the bribery. Even famous thief Lincoln Stephens, who testified on his behalf at trial, wrote in a private letter that he “didn’t care if he was guilty as hell.”
Ms Cowan said she was unsure whether it was legal to press charges against Mr Darrow, although she was not entirely sure. “I concluded that the standard for writers could be closer to the civic standard of ‘more likely than not,'” he said. “I wanted him to be a hero. But he was flawed. If you’re trying to be empathetic, you’re like, ‘Okay, what was he feeling?’ Just ask. I think he thought so [the McNamaras] Everything was stacked against them and they never got a fair shake. ”
Los Angeles was a boomtown in the early 1910s and a war zone between the forces of labor and capital.
“We don’t tend to picture Los Angeles as the Wild West right now,” Cowan said. That didn’t justify jury misconduct, but “there was a very brutal fight. There was a roughness about things.”
Sources include “Darrow’s Nightmare: Los Angeles 1911-1913” by Nelson C. Johnson, “The People v. Clarence Darrow: The Bribery Trial of America’s Great Lawyer” by Jeffrey Cowan, and “Clarence Darrow” by Jeffrey Cowan.・Darrow: A One-Man Play.” David Lintels, based on Irving Stone’s “The Defense of Clarence Darrow.”
