Chicago is corrupt. Or, at least it was, I suppose at this moment it may not be. The last two governors of Illinois, of which Chicago is the capital, are in prison. Born in 1867 and living until 1938, Darrow lived through Chicago's explosion into a major city and the awful conditions that spurred books such as The Jungle. He was one of the greatest orators of his time, and this was a time of great orators. Closing arguments in some cases ran for days.
The subtitle for the book is "Attorney for the damned". Darrow did represent the dregs of society: murderers, bombers, union activists. He lost very few cases. He prepared carefully; he used a folksy manner to disarm the witnesses he cross-examined; he was a brilliant speaker. He stated his tactics:
You try to throw around the case a feeling of pity, of love, if possible, for the fellow who is on trial. If the jurors can be made to identify with the defendant and his pain and position they will act to satisfy themselves. As this point, the case is won. Juries will furnish their own rationalization.Although Farrell does not use the phrase confirmation bias, that is what Darrow is explaining, I expect. We like to believe that we gather all the facts and make our decision. More accurate is we gather some of the facts, make our decision, and then accept subsequent observations that bolster our decision and ignore and discount those observations at odds with our decision.
While many who recognize Darrow's name associate him with representing poor defendants, he made his money representing the rich and powerful, for example, corporations angling for exclusive franchises with the City of Chicago. Farrell opens his story with Darrow as general counsel for a railroad. One type of client he would not accept, however, were those seeking to maintain legal rulings outlawing unionization. He forcefully advocated for the working man (and woman and child) throughout his life. He belonged to the NAACP; he was an atheist; he believed in free love, thought marriage was confining to both men and women. He was a liberal fifty years ahead of his time.
It was during one such advocacy that he may have conspired to bribe two jurors. He was prosecuted for both, one after the other, with the dual prosecution intended to maximize the harassment. He served as co-counsel for both cases and both times was acquitted. However, it was the opinion of his friends, and of the author, that Darrow was guilty, or if not guilty of these particular charges he was guilty of bribery on other instances. During the time, when the West was still somewhat wild and Chicago was providing its standard level of corruption, it was common for both sides to engage in extra-courtroom activities.
I did not realize that Darrow was defense attorney during the Scopes trial, and my understanding of the case was only superficial. I learned from this book that the defendant was not so much selected by the State of Tennessee for prosecution as he volunteered as an ACLU recruit. Tennessee engaged William Jennings Bryan, an eloquent speaker in his own right, former Secretary of State for President Wilson, and well-known critic of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, to assist the prosecution. Darrow learned of Bryan's involvement and contacted John Scopes, offering his services, and Scopes accepted, to the dismay of the ACLU, who wanted to showcase religious and academic freedom, where as Darrow had a history of showcasing himself.
The Butler Act, of which Scopes was accused of violating, prohibited the teaching in public school any theory of human origin that contradicted the Biblical description. The prosecution's strategy was not to prove the accuracy of the Bible; rather, merely to show that a State has the right to prescribe what instruction the taxpayers will finance and that Scopes did not so instruct. Darrow's strategy was to place Bryan on the stand (questioning the opponent's attorney is unusual indeed) and to cause Bryan to admit that the Bible is not literally true in every aspect. This questioning occurred out-of-doors, in the summertime, both to provide relief from the heat and because, in any event, far more local and non-locals wanted to attend than could fit in the courthouse. Entrepreneurs took the opportunity to put up refreshment stands, trained monkeys and live music.
Bryan, who was aging and less mentally agile than his former self, admitted that the six days mentioned in Genesis may not have been the twenty-four hour days to which we are accustomed. This being so, the evolutionary process that Darwin proposed did not necessarily contradict the Bible, because it could be the case that all of evolution occurred during these six very, very long days. This may have even been a winning argument, if not for the fact that the prosecution and defense stipulated to a guilty verdict and a $100 fine so that the case could be appealed to a higher court.
Darrow took the appeal to the Tennessee Supreme Court, again irking the ACLU. He won there, technically, but in a sense lost. The justices upheld the law but also decided that the trial judge setting the amount of the fine, rather than the jury, was impermissible error. The justices also, strangely, instructed the prosecutor not to re-try the case. The law remained on the book, theoretically enforceable, until the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a similar law.
Farrell is an excellent read.
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