Because this assessment is not assigned a formal grade, you must come to the Writing Center to review your work with a member of our staff.  

A year ago a group of high school students in Pearl, Mississippi, conspired to murder some fellow students and their parents. (At least five incidents of school homicide have followed.) The dynamics of the group and the motives for the killings may never become entirely clear. But such an event is not unprecedented. Seventy-five years ago a similar homicide and a celebrated trial shocked the nation. Nathan Leopold, age nineteen, and Richard Loeb, age eighteen, two precocious college graduates in Chicago, both from wealthy families, kidnapped and murdered Bobby Franks, a fourteen-year- old boy who lived in their neighborhood, and then tried to extort a ransom from the boy's family. As the result of their bumbling and some remarkable police work, they were caught, and they confessed.

The two youths were neither deprived nor mistreated. They could look forward to a brilliant future. Why this senseless crime? They sought a thrill, the kind of elation in a momentary experience that Baudelaire imagined. But they planned for it over a long time. They hoped it would demonstrate that they could conceive and carry out a perfect crime. And such a crime would demonstrate their superiority to, and exemption from, the ordinary laws of mankind.

The young men's defense was conducted by Clarence Darrow, the most famous trial lawyer of the era. He had them plead guilty without plea bargaining; that way they would appear before a judge alone. The hearing, with many witnesses for both sides, lasted more than a month. Having avoided an unwanted jury trial through guilty pleas that acknowledged the sanity of his clients, Darrow deployed witnesses and arguments to prove that the defendants were mentally impaired. In his magisterial summation, published in newspapers nationwide, Darrow cited the influence on Leopold of Nietzsche and his superman philosophy. He turned it into a mitigating circumstance. "Your Honor, it is hardly fair to hang a nineteen-year-old boy for the philosophy that was taught him at the university." Darrow said that the fact that Leopold lived and practiced the superman myth was evidence of a "diseased mind."

The most persuasive, finally successful part of Darrow's argument was against the inhumanity of capital punishment as no improvement over an eye for an eye. The judge sentenced Leopold and Loeb to life plus ninety-nine years. But along the way Darrow had stretched and even exceeded legal limits in his effort to transform guilt or conscious evil into insanity. The prosecutor, Robert E. Crowe, in his summation, quoted Theodore Roosevelt's response to a plea of insanity by a prisoner on death row: "I have scant sympathy with a plea of insanity advanced to save a man from the consequences of crime when, unless that crime had been committed, it would have been impossible to persuade any reasonable authority to commit him to an asylum as insane." No friend or familiar had ever considered Leopold or Loeb mentally incompetent before their crime. And Crowe felt compelled to reveal Darrow's deepest convictions about the nature of crime. He read to the packed court and into the historical record a statement Darrow had made twenty years earlier to prisoners in the Cook County jail in Chicago: "The reason I talk to you on the question of crime, its cause and cure, is because I really do not believe the least in crime."

It sounded for a time as if Darrow were being put on trial. First, he partially excused the boys' evil actions by attributing them to the influence of Nietzsche's ideas, the ideas of a man who went mad. Second, he had publicly advocated ideas about social determinism and the nonexistence of crime and moral responsibility. These ideas, if accepted, would not merely mitigate the crime; they would undermine the entire judicial system in which Darrow was participating, and would eliminate from social relations any guiding principles of good and evil, sanity and madness, innocence and guilt. This disturbing revelation close to the end of the trial did not halt Darrow's juggernaut against capital punishment. But it demonstrated that highly articulate and influential people close to the criminal-justice system may entertain notions about the nature of evil and free will that are utterly at odds with the basic principles of that system.

 

This section consists of one writing assignment. You are asked to prepare a composition on an assigned topic.

Your composition should effectively communicate a whole message for the stated purpose. You will be assessed on your ability to express, organize, and support opinions and ideas. You will not be assessed on the position you express.

1. Coordination