Free Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned by John A. Farrell

Whitlock gave Darrow one of his unpublished short stories to read.
    Gregory was more successful. He went to the North Side criminal court of his college classmate and former partner JudgeArthur Chetlain and argued that Prendergast had become insane since his trial and so, under a little-noted Illinois statute, was entitled to have his sentence reviewed, yet again, by a jury. Just before midnight on Good Friday, less than twelve hours before Prendergast was to hang, Chetlain granted a reprieve. 9
    Harrison’s sons—Preston and Carter Jr.—had taken over their father’s newspaper. Mindful of the family’s feelings, Darrow had made a courtesy call on young Carter before entering the case. The Times had given extensive coverage to the trial, much of it fair, as long as Prendergast was making a steady march toward the gallows. Now the brothers erupted. The Times slighted Gregory as a common bankruptcy lawyer who used methods “unworthy of a shyster.” And Darrow was a hypocrite, “a regular Don Quixote, always chasing windmills and ever ready to remove imaginary wrongs, without being able to remove the beam out of his own eye.” He was a “yellow bilious-looking man with a rugged homely face and hair as straight as an Indian,” the Times reported, “sanguine, fond of notoriety, having about as much regard for the conventionalities as a heathen.” Not for the last time, a reporter noted Darrow’s sartorial defects. “He wears his clothes as if they had been thrown on him, and they always look as if they had known him a long time.”
    The Harrisons saved the worst for Judge Chetlain. They began publishing “toothsome … news morsels” alleging that the judge, who lived downtown in a bachelor apartment, had fathered two children with a young Swedish servant girl, whom he had married in secret and stashed in an immigrant neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. “It was an out-of-town wedding,” the paper said dryly, after doing the math in afront-page story and suggesting that “blonde … pretty buxom Lottie” was pregnant on her nuptial day. The rest of the city’s newspapers picked up the story, and Chetlain had to be restrained from assaulting an editor. It no doubt came as a relief to the judge when Trude asked the courts to postpone the matter until Chetlain’s term on the criminal branch of the county courts was over. 10
    JudgeJohn B. Payne took over in June and put the “insanity trial” on a fast track. On June 20, they began. Prendergast sent a note up to the judge, claiming to be the Democratic Party’s candidate for president. Payne put it aside and told the lawyers, “Daylight is burning, gentlemen.”
    Trude urged the jurors to rein in their sympathy. The assassin had a fine team of defense attorneys, blessed with “intelligence and cunning” and motivated by a thirst for notoriety, he said. “The more guilty of murder, the more foul and cruel that the murder is in its nature, the more green would be the laurels which would entwine themselves around the brows of these gentlemen who appear here.” 11
    The defense called its doctors, who offered their opinions and read excerpts from the defendant’s mad scribbling. On the trial’s second day, Prendergast took the stand and, at the invitation of the defense, was examined by Judge Payne. At times the defendant was cheerful and helpful, at other times petulant.
    “Where did you get the pistol?” the judge asked him.
    “I can’t answer that question. I do not consider it my duty,” Prendergast replied.
    “You killed Harrison. What more right have you to live than Mr. Harrison had?” the judge asked.
    “I have a certain divine right,” said Prendergast. It had been granted him, he told the judge, by St. Peter. 12
    The two sides ended a parade of forty-two witnesses and began final arguments on July 2. Darrow, again, closed for the defense. Spectators took every seat, jammed the aisles, and surrounded the judge’s bench.
    “I