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Death, for certain?

The judge reviewed the possible punishments under the statutes. For murder, death, or fourteen years to life in jail. For kidnapping, death, or from five years to life imprisonment.

“Under the plea of guilty, the duty of determining the punishment devolved upon the court, and the law indicates no rule or policy for the guidance of his discretion. In reaching his decision the court would have welcomed the counsel and support of others. Nevertheless the court is willing to meet his responsibilities.

“It would have been the task of least resistance to impose the extreme penalty of the law.”

Then it was life!

Already, smiles were breaking, but Judd and Artie did not dare to breathe. “In choosing imprisonment instead of death, the court is moved chiefly by the consideration of the age of the defendants, boys of eighteen and nineteen years.”

Wilk’s tired face glowed. For in the end, this had been his choice of emphasis, youth and the precedent of consideration for youth.

“The court believes 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. More than that, it seems to be in accordance with the precedents hitherto observed in this state.

“Life imprisonment, at the moment, strikes the public imagination less forcibly than would death by hanging; but to the offenders, particularly of the type they are, the prolonged suffering of years of confinement may well be the severest form of retribution and expiation.”

The entire courtroom was stirring, breathing. Perhaps Judd was already computing the years before they might be admissible for parole. But Judge Matthewson’s voice took on a note of doom. “The court feels it proper to add a final word concerning the effect of the parole law upon the punishment of these defendants. In the case of such atrocious crimes, it is entirely within the discretion of the Department of Public Welfare never to admit these defendants to parole.

“To such a policy the court urges them strictly to adhere. If this course is persevered in the punishment of these defendants, it will both satisfy the ends of justice and safeguard the interests of society.”

Then he read the formal sentences. Upon each, for murder, “to be confined in the penitentiary at Joliet for the term of your natural life.”

In addition, for kidnapping for ransom, “to be confined in the penitentiary at Joliet for the term of ninety-nine years”.

As the sentences fell like successive iron bolts, sentences of life and for ever, the first surge of joy abated. But then the life-urge poured and inundated over all other feeling. Judd and Artie pounded each other, and turned to wave to those they knew in the court, and laughed with happiness, Judd quieting only for an instant as he caught his father’s eye, as the old man arose, scarcely less sorrowful than before, to follow Max from the courtroom. It was over. Disposition had been made.

Judd was pushing toward Wilk, with his hand extended. Wilk took his hand. There seemed, momentarily, a danger of tears in Judd’s eyes, but the clasp was ended by the brusque interruption of the bailiffs, who laid hands on the boys to take them out of the room as a protection for the lives that had just been given back to them.

During the rest of the day, the tumult over the verdict was augmented by rumours of assassination plots. Mike Prager offered bets that they would never reach the state penitentiary in Joliet alive. There was a tip that three hundred members of the Ku Klux Klan were massing in Berwyn, just west of Chicago, that they would block the road with their cars and lynch the prisoners.

At dusk, Judd and Artie, surrounded by guards, were slipped into a large black Marmon that waited, with motor running, at the rear entrance of the jail. They were linked together by a short chain, from wrist to wrist. In their car sat four guards with pistols drawn and pump guns on their knees. A vehicle filled with police preceded their car, and two others followed. The cavalcade departed at high speed.

So nervous were the custodians that they twice came close to wreckage on the road. Once, on the outskirts of the city, a collision was avoided only by a rapid swerve that threw guards and prisoners into one heap and brought laughter from Judd and Artie. The second time, a sudden stop at a railroad crossing forced the prisoners’ car into a ditch.

But in a few hours Artie and Judd were delivered to the state prison authorities, and suddenly the entire drama was over. The walls shut in on them. For each, prison life began with solitary confinement.

And it was indeed so that the world seemed to envisage the remainder of their existence. As the press wires compiled reactions to the sentence, we read the New York Times editorial declaring that prison for them should truly mean “the oubliette”, that it should be “a life extinguishment virtually as complete as death”.

An Indianapolis paper declared that the judge had spoken truly when he pictured a lifetime in jail as worse punishment than execution. But could they not sometime get out? This seemed a pervasive fear. Legal experts gave interviews showing that they might be paroled in fifty years, even in twenty years. The Chicago Tribune editorialized that despite the judge’s advice against parole no one could tell what would happen. And while grudgingly accepting the sentence, the Tribune declared that it was more than anything a sentence against capital punishment, for if these two did not deserve to hang, then anyone hanged thereafter in the state of Illinois would be hanged unjustly.

Yet for all the rumblings, the act of disposition seemed indeed to have ended the case. Crank letters and threatening calls rapidly fell off. The court had spoken, and the case was decided. And in a few days, we had not a line about Steiner and Straus in the paper. We ran only a Sunday article by an eminent law professor pointing out that the elaborate psychiatric evidence introduced into the case would prove a landmark in medical jurisprudence.

A FEW DAYS after the verdict I made up my mind at last to call Ruth. Only then I learned that she had gone East, that she had transferred to Smith College.

For the next few months I stayed on the paper in Chicago. I began an affair with a girl reporter on the News, an “emancipated woman”. Those were the beginning days of the gang wars, and I became an expert on them – always the speeding car, the fusillade, the riddled body or bodies; then the gangster funeral, and the box-score tally, and rarely an arrest, almost never a conviction; it was just people shooting it out on the streets, it was the same as when kids did it. Bang, you’re dead.

There came the question of accepting the prize for helping to capture Steiner and Straus. Ten thousand dollars was to be divided between the Pole who had found the glasses and the detective who had traced them, and several others. And Tom and I were to have a thousand dollars each.

If I refused, I would be implying that Tom was wrong in accepting. There was not a reason in the world for refusing. Afterward, Tom and I got ritually drunk at Louie’s. I said I would go to Europe and write.

I even had it in mind, when I went East, to stop at Smith College. And so I wrote to Ruth. Her reply was cordial but cool. She congratulated me on my reward “since it would help me further my writing ambitions”.

I tried in a letter to explain myself, and she wrote back that the whole experience was perhaps too strong as yet for both of us, that perhaps when I came back from Europe, we could renew our friendship.