Read these snippets and find the complete story here .Striking, the similarities in divisive language between then and now.

Criminal Minds~ A Case America Will never Forget

By Simon Baatz

In 1924, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb kidnapped and murdered a 14-year-old boy. An outraged nation cried for vengeance, but the famed attorney Clarence Darrow had a trick up his sleeve….

Leopold and Loeb had met in the summer of 1920. Both boys had grown up in Kenwood, an exclusive Jewish neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago. Leopold was a brilliant student who matriculated at the University of Chicago at the age of 15. He also earned distinction as an amateur ornithologist, publishing two papers in The Auk, the leading ornithological journal in the United States. His family was wealthy and well connected. His father was an astute businessman who had inherited a shipping company and had made a second fortune in aluminum can and paper box manufacturing. In 1924, Leopold, 19, was studying law at the University of Chicago; everyone expected that his career would be one of distinction and honor.

Richard Loeb, 18, also came from a wealthy family. His father, the vice president of Sears, Roebuck & Company, possessed an estimated fortune of $10 million. The third son in a family of four boys, Loeb had distinguished himself early, graduating from University High School at the age of 14 and matriculating later the same year at the University of Chicago.

The trial, Crowe quickly realized, would be a sensation. Nathan Leopold admitted they had murdered Bobby solely for the thrill of the experience. ("A thirst for knowledge is highly commendable, no matter what extreme pain or injury it may inflict upon others," Leopold had told a newspaper reporter. "A 6-year-old-boy is justified in pulling the wings from a fly, if by so doing he learns that without wings the fly is helpless.") The defendants' wealth, their intellectual ability, the high regard within Chicago for their families and the capricious nature of the homicide—everything combined to make the crime one of the most intriguing murders in the history of Cook County.

Crowe also realized that he could turn the case to his own advantage. He was 45 years old, yet already he had had an illustrious career as chief justice of the criminal court and, since 1920, as state's attorney of Cook County. Crowe was a leading figure in the Republican Party with a realistic chance of winning election as Chicago's next mayor. To send Leopold and Loeb to the gallows for their murder of a child would, no doubt, find favor with the public.

Indeed, the public's interest in the trial was driven by more than lurid fascination with the grisly details of the case. Sometime within the past few years the country had experienced a shift in public morality. Women now bobbed their hair, smoked cigarettes, drank gin and wore short skirts; sexuality was everywhere and young people were eagerly taking advantage of their new freedoms. The traditional ideals—centered on work, discipline and self-denial—had been replaced by a culture of self-indulgence. And what single event could better illustrate the dangers of such a transformation than the heinous murder of Bobby Franks? The evangelical preacher Billy Sunday, passing through Chicago on his way to Indiana, warned that the killing could be "traced to the moral miasma which contaminates some of our ‘young intellectuals.' It is now considered fashionable for higher education to scoff at God....Precocious brains, salacious books, infidel minds—all these helped to produce this murder."

Like Crowe, Darrow knew that he might be able to play the trial of Leopold and Loeb to his advantage. Darrow was passionately opposed to the death penalty; he saw it as a barbaric and vengeful punishment that served no purpose except to satisfy the mob. The trial would provide him with the means to persuade the American public that the death penalty had no place in the modern judicial system.

Darrow's opposition to capital punishment found its greatest source of inspiration in the new scientific disciplines of the early 20th century. "Science and evolution teach us that man is an animal, a little higher than the other orders of animals; that he is governed by the same natural laws that govern the rest of the universe," he wrote in the magazine Everyman in 1915. Darrow saw confirmation of these views in the field of dynamic psychiatry, which emphasized infantile sexuality and unconscious impulses and denied that human actions were freely chosen and rationally arranged. Individuals acted less on the basis of free will and more as a consequence of childhood experiences that found their expression in adult life. How, therefore, Darrow reasoned, could any individual be responsible for his or her actions if they were predetermined?

Endocrinology—the study of the glandular system—was another emerging science that seemed to deny the existence of individual responsibility. Several recent scientific studies had demonstrated that an excess or deficiency of certain hormones produced mental and physical alterations in the afflicted person. Mental illness was closely correlated with physical symptoms that were a consequence of glandular action. Crime, Darrow believed, was a medical problem. The courts, guided by psychiatry, should abandon punishment as futile and in its place should determine the proper course of medical treatment for the prisoner.

Such views were anathema to Crowe. Could any philosophy be more destructive of social harmony than Darrow's? The murder rate in Chicago was higher than ever, yet Darrow would do away with punishment. Crime, Crowe believed, would decline only through the more rigorous application of the law. Criminals were fully responsible for their actions and should be treated as such. The stage was set for an epic courtroom battle. 

Each set of psychiatrists—one for the state, the other for the defense—contradicted the other. Few observers noticed that each side spoke for a different branch of psychiatry and was, therefore, separately justified in reaching its verdict. The expert witnesses for the state, all neurologists, had found no evidence that any organic trauma or infection might have damaged either the cerebral cortex or the central nervous system of the defendants. The conclusion reached by the psychiatrists for the prosecution was, therefore, a correct one—there was no mental disease.

The psychiatrists for the defense—White, Glueck and Healy—could assert, with equal justification, that, according to their understanding of psychiatry, an understanding informed by psychoanalysis, the defendants had suffered mental trauma during childhood that had damaged each boy's ability to function competently. The result was compensatory fantasies that had led directly to the murder.

Most commentators, however, were oblivious to the epistemological gulf that separated neurology from psychoanalytic psychiatry. The expert witnesses all claimed to be psychiatrists, after all; and it was, everyone agreed, a dark day for psychiatry when leading representatives of the profession could stand up in court and contradict each other. If men of national reputation and eminence could not agree on a common diagnosis, then could any value be attached to a psychiatric judgment? Or perhaps each group of experts was saying only what the lawyers required them to say—for a fee, of course.

It was an evil that contaminated the entire profession, thundered the New York Times, in an editorial similar to dozens of others during the trial. The experts in the hearing were "of equal authority as alienists and psychiatrists," apparently in possession of the same set of facts, who, nevertheless, gave out "opinions exactly opposite and contradictory as to the past and present condition of the two prisoners.... Instead of seeking truth for its own sake and with no preference as to what it turns out to be, they are supporting, and are expected to support, a predetermined purpose....That the presiding Judge," the editorial writer concluded sorrowfully, "is getting any help from those men toward the forming of his decision hardly is to be believed."

The metropolis had paused in its morning bustle to hear the verdict.

Caverly's statement was brief. In determining punishment, he gave no weight to the guilty plea. Normally a guilty plea could mitigate punishment if it saved the prosecution the time and trouble of demonstrating culpability; but that had not been the case on this occasion.

The psychiatric evidence also could not be considered in mitigation. The defendants, Caverly stated, "have been shown in essential respects to be abnormal....The careful analysis made of the life history of the defendants and of their present mental, emotional and ethical condition has been of extreme interest....And yet the court feels strongly that similar analyses made of other persons accused of crime would probably reveal similar or different abnormalities....For this reason the court is satisfied that his judgment in the present case cannot be affected thereby."

Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb had been 19 and 18 years old, respectively, at the time of the murder. Did their youth mitigate the punishment? The prosecuting attorneys, in their concluding statements to the court, had emphasized that many murderers of similar age had been executed in Cook County; and none had planned their deeds with as much deliberation and forethought as Leopold and Loeb. It would be outrageous, Crowe had argued, for the prisoners to escape the death penalty when others—some even younger than 18—had been hanged.

Yet, Caverly decided he would hold back from imposing the extreme penalty on account of the age of the defendants. He sentenced each defendant to 99 years for the kidnapping and life in prison for the murder. "The court believes," Caverly stated, "that it is within his province to decline to impose the sentence of death on persons who are not of full age. This determination appears to be in accordance with the progress of criminal law all over the world and with the dictates of enlightened humanity."

The verdict was a victory for the defense, a defeat for the state. The guards allowed Leopold and Loeb to shake Darrow's hand before escorting the prisoners back to their cells. Two dozen reporters crowded around the defense table to hear Darrow's response to the verdict and, even in his moment of victory, Darrow was careful not to seem too triumphal: "Well, it's just what we asked for but...it's pretty tough." He pushed back a lock of hair that had fallen over his forehead, "It was more of a punishment than death would have been."

Crowe was furious at the judge's decision. In his statement to the press, Crowe made sure everyone knew whom to blame: "The state's attorney's duty was fully performed. He is in no measure responsible for the decision of the court. The responsibility for that decision rests with the judge alone." Later that evening, however, Crowe's rage would emerge in full public view, when he issued another, more inflammatory statement: "[Leopold and Loeb] had the reputation of being immoral...degenerates of the worst type....The evidence shows that both defendants are atheists and followers of the Nietzschean doctrines...that they are above the law, both the law of God and the law of man....It is unfortunate for the welfare of the community that they were not sentenced to death."