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The praise accorded Wilk, even in the papers that cried the loudest for blood, must have been the final goad to Horn, for he rushed into his hanging plea like a blinded fighter, flailing, hitting in every direction at once. It was Wilk that he attacked, as much as the murderers, for Wilk’s philosophy, he argued, would condone all crime, abandon all punishment, dissolve the basic rule that protected society. There were screaming, flailing periods when his voice went ridiculously high, and even Judd and Artie smiled sardonically, and this drove him to utmost fury.

Horn began with sarcasm: “Before going into a discussion of the merits of the case, there is a matter I would like to refer to. The distinguished gentleman whose profession it is to protect murder in Cook County, and concerning whose health thieves inquire before they go to commit crime, has seen fit to abuse the State’s Attorney’s office. We all have hearts of stone.

“We have dared to tell Your Honour that this is a cold-blooded murder. We ought not to refer to these two young men, the poor sons of multimillionaires, with any coarse language. We should have come up here and tried these kiddies with kindness and consideration!

“Your Honour ought not to shock their ears with cruel references to the laws of the State, to the penalty of death. Why, don’t you know that one of them has to shave every day of the week, and that is a bad sign. The other one has to shave only twice a week, and that is a bad sign. One is short and one is tall, and it is equally a bad sign in both of them. One is over-developed sexually and the other not quite so good.

“My God, if one of them had a harelip, I suppose Jonathan Wilk would want me to apologize for even having them indicted!

“We are cold-blooded! We have planned, according to Mr. Wilk, for three months and we have conspired to take the lives of two little boys who were wandering in dreamland.”

Padua was a decent, clean-living man, he told us, and so was Czewicki; as for himself, “I believe that not even Mr. Wilk, who has known me for years, would say that Arthur Horn is a vicious, cruel, heartless monster.” Were he not State’s Attorney he would have no feeling of animosity against these two individuals. When they were in his custody he had treated them with “kindness and consideration”. When he had first received Judd’s name as a possible owner of the glasses he had interviewed him at a hotel, so as to keep the matter out of the newspapers. “I think the State’s Attorney of this county is as kindly a man as the paid humanitarian, the man who believes in doing his fellow citizens good – after he has done them good and plenty.”

There was hesitant laughter.

“But as a public official selected by the people, charged with the duty of enforcing the law of my country,” he shouted, “I have no right to forgive those who violate their country’s laws. It is my duty to prosecute them.

“You have a right to forgive, and I know you do forgive those who trespass against Gilbert Matthewson personally, but sitting here as Chief Justice of this great court, you have no right to forgive anybody who violates the law! You have got to deal with him as the law prescribes!

“Your Honour, in this case, with the mass of evidence presented by the State, if a jury were sitting in that box and they returned a verdict and they did not fix the punishment at death, every person in this community, including Your Honour and myself, would feel that the verdict was founded on corruption!”

The judge’s face darkened, but he kept his composure.

“And I will tell you why. I have taken quite a trip during the last four or five weeks. I thought I was going to be kept in Chicago all summer trying this case, and that most of my time would be spent in the Criminal Court Building. I did come up to Your Honour’s courtroom five weeks ago, but then Old Doc Yak – what is his name? The man from Washington – Oh, Dr. McNarry – Dr. McNarry took me by the hand and led me into the nursery of two poor, rich young boys, and he introduced me to a teddy bear. Then he told me some bedtime stories, and after I got through listening to them he took me into the kindergarten and he presented to me a little Artie and Judd.

“I was then taken by the hand by the Feldscher brothers and taken to a psychopathic laboratory, and there I received quite a liberal education in mental diseases, and particularly what certain doctors did not know about them.”

The defence lawyers were sitting back, smiling.

“The three wise men from the East, who came on to tell Your Honour about these little babes, wanted to make the picture a little more perfect, and one of them was sacrilegious enough to say this pervert, this murderer, this kidnapper, thought that he was the Christ Child and that he thought that his mother was the Madonna.

“Why, this young pervert has proclaimed since he was eleven years of age that there is no God!” He turned to Judd. “I wonder now whether you think there is a God or not!

“I wonder whether you think it is pure accident, with your Nietzschean philosophy, that you dropped your glasses, or whether it was an act of Divine Providence to visit upon your miserable carcasses the wrath of God in the enforcement of the laws of the state of Illinois.”

Then, turning back to the bench: “Well, if Your Honour please, after the Feldschers had completed my education in the psychopathic laboratories, then my good friend Jonathan Wilk took me on a Chautauqua trip with him, visiting social settlements such as the Hull House, to expound his peculiar philosophy of life, and we would meet with communists and anarchists, and Jonathan would regale them with his philosophy of the law, which means there ought not to be any law and there ought not to be any enforcement of the law.

“I don’t know whether the fact that he had a couple of rich clients who were dangerously close to the gallows prompted that trip or not.

“If Your Honour please, when I occupied the position Your Honour graces, I had an unfortunate man come before me. I don’t know whether his pineal gland was calcified or ossified. I don’t know whether he had clubfoot or not, and I did not inspect his mouth to find out whether he had a couple of baby teeth.”

He screamed, “I don’t know whether Thomas Fitzgerald developed sexually at fourteen or sixteen!

“I do know, and knew then, that under the law he had committed a dastardly crime; he had taken a little five-year-old girl, a daughter of the poor, and assaulted her and murdered her. And Mr. Wilk says that in carrying out my duty to sentence him to death I was bloodthirsty!

“The law says in extreme cases death shall be the penalty. When Mr. Wilk served in the legislature he introduced a bill to abolish capital punishment. It was defeated. If I were in the legislature I might vote either way on such a bill. I don’t know. But as a judge, I have no right to set aside the law. I have no right to defeat the will of the people, as expressed by the legislature of Illinois. I have no right to be a judicial anarchist, even if Jonathan Wilk is an anarchist advocate.

“He says that hanging does not stop murder. I think he is mistaken. From the time Thomas Fitzgerald expiated his crime upon the gallows, I have not heard of any little tot in Chicago who met a like fate to that which Janet Wilkinson met.

“He says that hanging does not stop murder. I will direct your attention to the year 1920 when we stopped a wave of lawlessness. Four judges for two months tried nothing but murder cases. In that brief period fifteen men were sentenced to death in the criminal court of Cook County.

“As a result of that, murder fell fifty-one per cent in Cook County during the year 1920.

“You have heard a lot about England. Well, I never had any liking for her laws as they applied to my ancestors and people in an adjoining isle, but I have learned to have a wholesome respect for the manner in which they enforce the laws of England.

“There, murder is murder; it is not a fantasy. Justice is handed out swiftly and surely, and as a result there are less murders in the entire kingdom of Great Britain yearly than there are in the city of Chicago!”