Case Study 5: The Case of Leopold and Loeb (1924)

Darrow with Leopold and Loeb at the arraignment hearing in 1924.

Clarence Darrow (1857-1938) was an American lawyer who gained a great reputation for the quality of the defences he could make in hard and contentious cases. He was a Darwinian and although not a philosopher he certainly thought that people were conditioned by their circumstances. In 1924 he agreed to defend two teenage friends, Nathan Leopold (19) and Richard Loeb (18). They had been accused of kidnapping and murdering a 14-year old boy, Bobby Franks. Leopold (1904-1971) and Loeb (1905-1936) were from wealthy backgrounds and both were excellent students. Leopold had studied at Chicago and was about to go on to the Harvard Law School; Loeb was the University of Michigan's youngest graduate. Leopold and Loeb had kidnapped Franks and held him to ransom. But they decided to kill him. They hid the body and intended to claim the ransom. However, the body was found and Leopold's spectacles were found near by. The boys were arrested. Their alibis crumbled, each blamed the other for the killing, but soon they made full confessions, explaining that they had been motivated by the desire to pull off a perfect crime and to the love of thrill and excitement. All the evidence and their confessions pointed to first-degree murder and a death sentence, but Darrow had other ideas. He did not enter a plea of insanity and try to argue mitigation; he had the boys plead guilty to avoid a jury trial where a vengeful jury would almost certainly convict. Thus Darrow appeared before the judge only at the sentencing hearing.

Darrow made a twelve-hour closing address. He called many expert witnesses to support his argument that the boys were mentally diseased and so not fully responsible for their actions. He coupled this to the fact that the boys were both under 21, and at that time he argued there was no precedent in the state for a death sentence on anyone under 21. (He was wrong in this – two such sentences had in fact been carried out.) Darrow's deterministic argument was that the psychological and environmental influences on the boy's upbringing had conditioned their attitudes and their behaviour to remove them from the conventional routines of right and wrong. He maintained that no action was with out a cause, and of course, that the causes were deterministic. Here are some extracts from Darrow's summation :

‘The boys had been reared in luxury, they had never been denied anything; no want or desire left unsatisfied; no debts; no need of money; nothing. And yet they murdered a little boy, against whom they had nothing in the world, without malice, without reason, to get $5,000 each. All right. All right, Your Honor, if the court believes it, if anyone believes it, I can't help it. That is what this case rests on. It could not stand up a minute without motive. without it, it was the senseless act of immature and diseased children, as it was; a senseless act of children, wandering around in the dark and moved by some motion, that we still perhaps have not the knowledge or the insight into life to thoroughly understand.'
‘Why did they kill little Bobby Franks? Not for money, not for spite; not for hate. They killed him as they might kill a spider or a fly, for the experience. They killed him because they were made that way. Because somewhere in the infinite processes that go to the making up of the boy or the man something slipped, and those unfortunate lads sit here hated, despised, outcasts, with the community shouting for their blood.'
‘If there had been a question of revenge, yes; if there had been a question of hate, where no one cares for his own fate, intent only on accomplishing his end, yes. But without any motive or any reason they picked up this little boy right in sight of their own homes, and surrounded by their neighbors. They hit him over the head with a chisel and killed him, and go on about their business, driving this car within half a block of Loeb's home, within the same distance of the Franks's home, drive it past the neighbors that they knew, in the open highway, in broad daylight. And still men will say that they have a bright intellect.
I say again, whatever madness and hate and frenzy may do to the human mind, there is not a single person who reasons who can believe that one of these acts was the act of men, of brains that were not diseased. There is no other explanation for it. And had it not been for the wealth and the weirdness and the notoriety, they would have been sent to the psychopathic hospital for examination, and been taken care of, instead of the state demanding that this court take the last pound of flesh and the last drop of blood from two irresponsible lads.'

The effect of Darrow's argument was that Judge Caverly decided to sentence both Leopold and Loeb to Life imprisonment and 99 years – the make clear that this was a life sentence with no parole. This was not what happened however – after 33 years in prison Leopold was released on parole in 1958. Loeb was killed by a fellow inmate in 1936.
Your view of the Leopold and Loeb case:

Support for determinism: Support for free will:

Your conclusion and justification: