“And yet this court is urged, aye, threatened, that he must hang two boys contrary to precedents.
“Why need a judge be urged by every argument, moderate and immoderate, to hang two boys in the face of every precedent in Illinois and in the face of the progress of the last fifty years?
“Lawyers stand here day by day and read cases from the Dark Ages, where judges have said that if a man had a grain of sense left, and a child barely out of his cradle, he could be hanged because he knew the difference between right and wrong. Death sentences for eighteen, seventeen, sixteen, and fourteen years have been cited.
“As if this had something to do with the year 1924, as if it had something to do with Chicago, with its boys’ court and its fairly tender protection of the young.
“In as cruel a speech as he knew how to make, Mr. Padua said to this court that we plead guilty because we were afraid to do anything else.
“Your Honour, that is true.
“We have said to the public and to this court that neither the parents, nor the friends, nor the attorneys would want these boys released. They are as they are. They should be permanently isolated from society. We are asking this court to save their lives, which is the least and the most that a judge can do.
“We did plead guilty before Your Honour because we were afraid to submit our case to a jury. I can tell Your Honour why.
“I know perfectly well that where responsibility is divided by twelve it is easy to say, ‘Away with him’.
“But, Your Honour, if these boys hang, you must do it. You can never explain that the rest overpowered you. It must be by your deliberate, cool, premeditated act, without a chance to shift responsibility.
“Your Honour, I know that of four hundred and fifty persons who had been indicted for murder in Chicago in the past ten years and who had pleaded guilty, only one has been hanged. And my friend who is prosecuting this case earned the honour of that hanging while he was on the bench. But his victim was forty years old.” Wilk turned then to the prosecutor’s table. “I can sum up their arguments in a minute: cruel, dastardly, premeditated, fiendish, cowardly, cold-blooded.
“Cold-blooded!” And the long arm pointed. “Let the State, who is so anxious to take these boys’ lives, set an example in consideration, kindheartedness, and tenderness before they call my clients cold-blooded.
“Cold-blooded! Because they planned and schemed?
“Yes. But here are officers with all the power of the State, who for months have been planning and scheming and contriving to take these two boys’ lives.
“They say this is the most cold-blooded murder the civilized world has ever known. I don’t know what they include in the civilized world. I suppose Illinois. Now, Your Honour, I have been practising law a good deal longer than I should have, anyhow for forty-five or forty-six years, and during a part of that time I have tried a good many criminal cases, always defending. It does not mean that I am better. It probably means that I am more squeamish than the other fellows.
“I have never yet tried a case where the State’s Attorney did not say that it was the most cold-blooded, inexcusable, premeditated case that ever occurred. If it was murder, there never was such a murder.
“Why? Well, it adds to the credit of the State’s Attorney to be connected with a big case. That is one thing. They can say, ‘Well, I tried the most cold-blooded murder case that ever was tried, and I convicted them, and they are dead.’
“And then there is another thing, Your Honour: of course, I generally try cases to juries, and these adjectives always go well with juries – bloody, cold-blooded, despicable, cowardly, dastardly, cruel, heartless – the whole litany of the State’s Attorney’s office goes well with a jury.
“They say this was a cruel murder, the worst that ever happened. I say that very few murders ever occurred that were as free from cruelty as this.”
He waited for the chill of these words to pass through us. “Poor little Paulie Kessler suffered very little. There is no excuse for his killing. If to hang these two boys would bring him back to life, I would say let them go, and I believe their parents would say so, too. But
The moving finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.
In the pause, Mike Prager remarked, “Ever hear of Wilk making a plea without Omar Khayyám?”
Wilk resumed, turning now to the State’s argument. Horn had taken pains to build up the ransom as the motive. This was almost too easy to ridicule, with their huge allowances, with Artie’s $3,000 bank account, with Judd’s $3,000 for a trip to Europe.
“And yet they murdered a little boy against whom they had nothing in the world, to get five thousand dollars each. That is what their case rests on. It could not stand up a minute without a motive. Without it, it was the senseless act of immature and diseased children, as it was.”
He turned and gazed at the boys, interminably, it seemed, and a gloom, a heart-heaviness at existence itself could be seen coming over him, and it came over the courtroom, too.
“How insane they are I care not, whether medically or legally. They committed the most unprovoked, most purposeless, most causeless act that any two boys ever committed, and put themselves where the rope is dangling above their heads.
“Was their act one of deliberation, of intellect, or were they driven by some force such as Dr. McNarry and Dr. Allwin have told this court?
“Why did they kill little Paulie Kessler?
“Not for money, not for spite, not for hate. They killed him because somewhere in the infinite processes that go to the making up of the boy or the man something slipped, and those unfortunate lads sit here hated, despised, outcasts, with the community shouting for their blood.
“Are they to blame for it? It is one of those things that happened; and it calls not for hate, but for kindness, for charity, for consideration.
“Mr. Padua with the immaturity of youth and inexperience says that if we hang them there will be no more killing. This world has been one long slaughterhouse from the beginning until today, and killing goes on and on and on, and will for ever. Why not read something, why not study something, why not think instead of blindly shouting for death?
“Kill them. Will that prevent other senseless boys or other vicious men or vicious women from killing? No!
“I heard the state’s attorney talk of mothers. I know that any mother might be the mother of a little Paulie Kessler who left his home and went to his school and never came back. I know that any mother might be the mother of Artie Straus, of Judd Steiner. The trouble is that if she is the mother of a Judd Steiner or of an Artie Straus, she has to ask herself the question, ‘How came my children to be what they are? From what ancestry did they get this strain? How far removed was the poison that destroyed their lives? Was I the bearer of the seed that brings them to death?’
“I remember a little poem that gives the soliloquy of a boy about to be hanged, a soliloquy such as these boys might make.” And he quoted Housman:
The night my father got me
His mind was not on me;
He did not plague his fancy
To muse if I should be
The son you see.
The boys were looking down. Judd seemed to brush at his eyes, and two rows behind him his father sat with a strange, tranced pain, his eyes fixed on the back of his son’s head.
The day my mother bore me
She was a fool and glad,