Plz 1 question will mark as brainliest if correct
read the speech.
excerpt from clarence darrow’s closing argument in illinois v. nathan leopold and richard loeb, august 22–25, 1924
in 1924, nathan leopold and richard loeb were convicted of killing a fourteen-year-old neighbor boy. leopold and loeb were in their late teens, from wealthy families, and both attended college. they wanted to commit the “perfect crime.” attorney clarence darrow, a lifetime opponent of the death penalty, was their defense attorney.
the whole life of childhood is a dream and an illusion, and whether they take one shape or another shape depends not upon the dreamy boy but on what surrounds him. as well might i have dreamed of burglars and wished to be one as to dream of policemen and wish to be a policeman. perhaps i was lucky, too, that i had no money. we have grown to think that the misfortune is in not having it.
the terrible misfortune in this terrible case is that they had money. that has destroyed their lives. that has given them these illusions. that has caused this mad act. and if your honor shall doom them to die it will be because they are the sons of the rich. do you suppose if they lived up here on the northwest side and had no money, with the evidence as clear in this case as it is, that any human being would want to hang them?
wealth, excessive wealth, is a grievous misfortune in every step in life. when i hear foolish people, when i read malicious newspapers talking of excessive fees in this case, it makes me ill. that there is nothing else in life, that it is to be presumed that no man lives to whom money is not the first concern, that human instincts, sympathy and kindness and charity and logic can only be used for cash—it shows how deeply money has corrupted the hearts of all people.
now to get to dickie loeb. he was a child. the books he read by day were not the books he read by night. we are all of us molded somewhat by the influences around us and to people who read, perhaps books are the most and the strongest.
i know where my life has been molded by books, amongst other things. we all know where our lives have been molded by books, amongst other things. we all know where our lives have been influenced by books. the nurse, strict and jealous and watchful, gave him one kind of books—by night he would steal off and read the other.
do you mean to tell me that dickie loeb had any more to do with his making than any other product of heredity that is born upon the earth? at this period of life it is not enough to take a boy—your honor, i wish i knew when to stop talking about this question that is interesting me so much—it is not enough to take a boy filled with his dreams and his fantasies and living in an unreal world, but the age of adolescence comes on him with all the rest. what does he know?
both of these boys are in the adolescent age, both these boys whom every alienist in this case on both sides tells you is the most trying period in the life of a child, both these boys when the call of sex is new and strange, both these boys at a time seeking to adjust their young lives to the world, moved by the strongest feelings and passions that have ever moved men, both these boys at the time boys grow insane, at the time crimes are committed, all this added to all the rest of the vagaries do you charge them with the responsibility that we may have a hanging, that we may deck chicago in a holiday garb and let the people have their fill of blood, that you may put stains upon the heart of every man, woman and child on that day and that the dead walls of chicago will tell the story of blood?
for god's sake, are we crazy? in the face of history, of every line of philosophy, against the teaching of every religionist and seer and prophet the world has ever given us, we are still doing what our barbarous ancestors did when they came out of the caves and the woods!
from the age of 15 to the age of 20 or 21 the child has the burden of adolescence, of puberty and sex thrust upon him. girls are kept at home and carefully watched. boys without instruction are left to work it out themselves. it may lead to excess. it may lead to disease. it may lead to perveson. who is to blame? who did it? did dickie loeb do it?
your honor, i am almost ashamed to talk about it. i can hardly imagine we are in the nineteenth or the twentieth century. and yet there are men who seriously say that for what nature has done, for what life has done, for what training has done, take the boys' lives.

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