Clarence Darrow

I tell you today, there will come a time

when crime will disappear.  But that time

will never come or be hastened by the

building of jails and penitentiaries and scaffolds.

It will only come by changing the conditions of life

under which men live and suffer and die.

     -Clarence Darrow

      (from summation, State of California v. Clarence Darrow)

Clarence Seward Darrow.  1857-1938.  American lawyer.  After a career as a successful corporation lawyer, he turned to labor law. In 1895, Darrow conducted an unsuccessful defense of the labor organizer Eugene V. Debs, who had been charged with violating an injunction in the Pullman strike of 1894.  In 1907 he won acquittal for the radical labor leader William ("Big Bill") Haywood on a charge of conspiring to murder a former governor of Idaho.

Charged with bribing jurors in the case of James B. McNamara (accused with his brother John J. McNamara in the bombing of the Los Angeles Times building).

He subsequently concentrated on criminal law cases.  A bitter foe of capital punishment, Darrow defended more than 50 accused murderers, losing only one to the executioner.  One of his most celebrated trials was that of the young thrill-murderers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, for whom he obtained life sentences instead of death.  Equally celebrated was his unsuccessful defense in the 1925 Scopes trial in Tennessee, in which the agnostic Darrow skillfully fenced with the fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan over the biblical evidence against evolution.