TNY 1/17/00 PAGE 23
THE TALK OF THE TOWN
COMMENT
3
The execution of youth.
IN the summer of
1924, in a stifling
Chicago courtroom,
America’s most cele-
brated trial lawyer, Clarence Darrow,
delivered what is still America’s most
celebrated oration against capital pun-
ishment. The guilt of Darrow’s clients,
Nathan Leopold, Jr., and Richard Loeb,
was not in question. Neither was the
depravity of their crime: they had kid-
napped and bludgeoned to death a
fourteen-year-old boy, and they had
done it for fun. An indignant press and
public demanded that they be hanged.
To save them from that fate was Dar-
row’s only goal. He spoke for twelve
hours, piling argument upon ingeni-
ous argument—he even suggested that
Leopold had been corrupted by read-
ing Nietzsche.
Darrow’s speech was stirring and
brilliant. But Judge John Caverly re-
jected all his arguments except one.
“The court is moved chiefly by the con-
sideration of the age of the defendants,”
he wrote. “This determination appears
to be in accordance with the progress of
criminal law all over the world and with
the dictates of enlightened human-
ity. . . . The court believes it is within his
province to decline to impose the sen-
tence of death on persons who are not
of full age.” At the time, Leopold was
nineteen years old; Loeb was eighteen.
They received life sentences.
This week, in Virginia, two people
are scheduled to be executed for crimes
they committed when they were even
younger than Leopold and Loeb: Chris
Thomas, now twenty-six, who killed his
girlfriend’s parents in 1990, and Steve
Roach, now twenty-three, who mur-
dered an elderly neighbor in 1993. Glen
McGinnis, now twenty-six, is sched-
uled to die later this month in Texas
for killing a laundry attendant nine
years ago. In all three cases, the chance
of further appeals is remote. Twenty-
three of the thirty-eight states that al-
low the death penalty permit the ex-
ecution of juvenile offenders, some as
young as sixteen. Governor George W.
Bush, who has presided over more
than a hundred execut