They Killed for Kicks.

A 1924 case posed the question: Should teen murderers be executed?

On the afternoon of Wednesday, May 21, 1924, 14-year-old Bobby Franks was walking home after umpiring a school baseball game. A dark-blue car pulled up with two young men inside. Bobby recognized them, because they all lived in the same wealthy Chicago neighborhood. He got in and the car drove away.

That evening, a man telephoned Bobby's home and told his mother that the boy had been kidnapped. The next morning a neatly typed letter arrived. The kidnappers demanded a $10,000 ransom.

But Bobby was already dead. His head had been smashed. His naked body had been shoved head first into a pipe beneath a railroad track in a remote section of the city.

Bobby Franks's murder horrified the nation. Journalists called it the "crime of the century." His killers, it turned out, were rich, smart, and smug, and they had done the deed coolly for kicks. Also, they were teenagers themselves, just a few years older than Bobby.

The case led to a historic test of the law's harshest punishment: the death penalty. The question before the court: If teenagers commit murder, should they be put to death?

On May 22, workers discovered the boy's body. They also found a pair of eyeglasses, which detectives soon traced to Nathan F. Leopold Jr. Leopold, a whiz kid with a genius IQ, was 19, but already a college graduate and a law student at the University of Chicago. He told police he had lost his glasses during a bird-watching trip with his best friend, Richard Loeb.

Police then talked to Loeb, just 18 years old and also a graduate student. But the boys' alibis didn't match. Under questioning, the two soon confessed. They had kidnapped and killed Bobby for the sheer thrill of it.

The details of the story filled newspapers across the country. The killers were the handsome, pampered sons of Chicago millionaires. Intellectually brilliant, Leopold and Loeb believed that normal rules didn't apply to them. And their relationship was intense. They had stolen cars and set fires together and had had some sexual contact with each other.

But what shocked people most was the killers' cool detachment in carrying out the murder and their utter lack of remorse. Psychiatrists who interviewed the pair learned that they had chosen their victim at random and killed him as a bizarre experiment. The New York Times reported,

Leopold is an experimenter in human emotions, his examiners are reputed to believe. He wanted to kill a human being so he could satisfy his curiosity as to "what a man who has committed a cold-blooded murder thinks about." ... His comment on his own crime, that taking human life is as commonplace "as sticking a pin through the back of a beetle," is quoted as indicative of his mental condition.

Having obtained signed confessions and mountains of damning evidence, the prosecutor declared, "I have a hanging case." Most Americans agreed: If ever a crime deserved the death penalty, this was it.

To defend their sons, the families hired Clarence Darrow, a renowned Chicago lawyer and a powerful courtroom orator. The next year, he would make history defending a Tennessee teacher charged with teaching about evolution. (See "Evolution on Trial," UPFRONT, 10/4/99.)

The families knew that Darrow hated the death penalty and had saved more than 100 clients from the gallows. As a Darrow biographer reports, Loeb's uncle begged:

Get them a life sentence instead of death. that's all we ask. We'll pay anything, only for God's sake, don't let them hang.

Taking this request to heart, Darrow made a surprising move. Most people expected him to claim that the boys were not guilty due to insanity. But that would have required a jury trial. Instead, Darrow had his clients plead guilty, so that a lone judge would pass sentence after a hearing. He told Judge John Caverly:

I know perfectly well that where responsibility is divided by 12 it is easy to say, "Away with him." But, your honor, if these boys hang, you must do it.... It must be your deliberate, cool, premeditated act, without a chance to shift responsibility.

Even without an insanity plea, the law required the judge to consider factors that might lessen the sentence. So Darrow tried to show that his clients were mentally ill, blaming the crime on their "weird mentalities" and their influence on each other. Then he said:

I can picture them, wakened in the gray light of morning, furnished a suit of clothes by the state, led to the scaffold, their feet tied, black caps drawn over their heads, stood on a trap door, the hangman pressing a spring, so that it gives way under them; I can see them fall through space and stopped by the rope around their necks.

In effect, Darrow was putting the death penalty itself on trial. His voice broke as he concluded:

I know that your honor stands between the future and the past. For me the future means the hopes of the young. I plead for life, charity, kindness, sympathy, and understanding. And the future is with me. I am pleading that all life is worth saving and that mercy is the highest attribute of man.

His speech left many listeners, including the judge, in tears. But in his own closing, prosecutor Robert Crowe compared the state's right to execute killers to its right to ask young men to risk their lives in battle--as young men had a few years before in World War I:

Many a boy 18 years of age lies buried beneath the poppies in Flanders Field, who died to defend the laws of this country. We had no compunction when we did that; why should we have any compunction when we take the lives of men nineteen years of age who want to tear down and destroy the laws that these brave boys died to preserve?

After deliberating for two weeks, Judge Caverly gave his verdict: life imprisonment for the murders, plus 99 years for the kidnapping. Caverly said:

In choosing imprisonment instead of death, the Court is moved chiefly by the consideration of the age of the defendants, boys of 18 and 19 years. This determination appears to be in accordance with the progress of criminal law all over the world and with the dictates of enlightened humanity.

In 1936, Loeb was killed in prison in a razor attack by a fellow inmate. Leopold was released on parole in 1958 and died in 1971. And today, 76 years after the pair's notorious crime, the debate about the death penalty for teenage killers in America goes on.

FOCUS: Leopold and Loeb Case Raises a Question: Do Teen Killers Deserve to Die?

TEACHING OBJECTIVES

To help students understand that today's debate over executing teen murderers is neither new nor novel. In 1924, the trial of thrill-killers Nathan F. Leopold Jr. and Richard Loeb fueled the same debate.

Discussion Questions:

* Why didn't attorney Clarence Darrow have his clients plead "not guilty by reason of insanity"? Would you have chosen as he did?

* Does the fact that Bobby Franks's murder occurred in 1924--long before videos, rap, and TV--diminish the argument that violent media produce violent behavior today?

CLASSROOM STRATEGIES

Discussion: Ask students why they believe the Leopold and Loeb case still resonates in the history of crime in America.

Tell students that many criminal courts now allow the families of murder victims to testify about how the loss of their loved ones has affected their lives. Should a judge or jury take these emotional presentations into account when deciding punishment? Or should punishment be decided solely on the legal facts? Might the Leopold-Loeb sentences have turned out differently if Bobby Franks's family had testified about the pain they suffered?

Critical Thinking: Have students read Nathan Leopold's statement, on page 31, that he wanted to know what one thinks after having committed "cold-blooded murder." Does this statement prove that Leopold was mentally ill? If Leopold had been 40 when he made that statement--rather than 19--might Judge Caverly have chosen the death penalty?

Compare and Contrast: Students can compare the Leopold and Loeb defense with the "lackluster" defense afforded Shareef Cousin in "Innocent on Death Row." Should courts ensure that all death-penalty defendants receive counsel as competent as that offered by Clarence Darrow? Why did Leopold and Loeb get one of the best lawyers, while Cousin received such a poor defense? (See question about court-appointed lawyers in Lesson Plan 2.)

Have students write a title, subtitle, and ad for a movie comparing the trials of Leopold-Loeb and Shareef Cousin.