The Birmingham age-herald., 1924-08-25
DARROW'S PLEA
 TO BE RENEWED
 IN COURT TODAY
Pictures Franks slayers In Clutches Of Monster
 Of Dim Past


 abyss of time malignant monsters came crawling.
 They were not of flesh and bones, these creatures of destruction. But 1 they were far more dangerous, infitely more potent, than any mere creations | of living tissue could have been.
 Every vicious impluse, dating from before the dawn of man, every criminal tendency, magnified in the human race through the development and spread l of human beings, was embodied in these monsters. Cruel as death, rendered emo tionless through the beating out of normal emotions on a granite wall of l circumstances, heredity and environ. 1 ment, these creatures took possession of two young university students in Chi 1 caRo in the year, 1924, and caused them to commit murder.
 Unusual Plea Advanced
 This unusual series of hypothetical premises is being used by Clarence s. | Darrow, chief defense counsel, to ex- plain the killing of 14-year-Old Robert Franks by Nathan F. Leopold, Jr., and l Richard Loeb. Through his plea that some strange influences, dating back from before mans beginning, combined to render the two multi-milliOnaires' sons devoid of ordinary emotions, Dar- row hopes to convince Justice Caverly that the slayers should not go to the gallows for their crimks.
 And on this unusual plea, perhaps the most astonishing ever made on behalf of confessed murderers, Darrow asks Justice Caverly to be merciful to ''twO children with diseased minds, not in sane, who are floundering about in l the dark"
 For two court days Darrow has l talked as few lawyers ever have talked in a court room. And as the hearing to determine whether mitigating circum stances enters what is expected to be kitAa closing week. Dhrrow is prepared to so. into his sub bject even more ex haustively. |,
 DenOunces Prosecution
 Waving his straying locks, grayed by the stress of years, and the burden of strife, Darrow majestically has ] paced back and forth before an excited and awe-stricken court room and al ternated his plea for mercy with de- nuneiation of the forces of the state demanding that the two youths hang.
 Tt would be a greater crime than these two children committed if the state should hang them for their own crime, crime without a motive, sense less, without reason, without emotion, Darrow told the court in one of his great oratorical climaxes.
 There is not a sane thing in all of this from the beginning to the end. And yet these boys have no insanity, in the legal sense of the word. There is not normal act in any of it, from the beginning to the end"
 Darrow has gone into the realm of the mind, into the history of mental development, into the history of the race, to find from an accumulation of human weakness a possible theory to account for what he terms an inexplica. ble crime.
 States Attorney Robert E. Grove i. not much impressed by this talk oi mind creatures, of evil influences al work through the centuries, of frai pieces of clay moulded by influences over which the helpless and weak crea lures had no control.
 Leopold and Loeb are sane, normal cold d-blooded, vicious and calculating murderers," Grove declares. "They de liberately committed an atrociOus crime, the worst in the annals of jurisprudence. The state will insist that they hang, like any other cold blooded and vicious murderers.''
 Jacob Franks is more determined than ever that the two youths whC kidnapped his little son shall go to thu gallOws.
 Hanging is the only penalty fol these young men," Franks insists. II would be an indictment of our courts a travesty on jutice and an indictment of our civilization itself if these mur derers were allowed to escape the onlJ just penalty for them, which is hang ing.
 T am unmoved by these astonishin, and fantastic pleas for mercy. They are just as strange as the stories about teddy bears and dreams an( there is no proof at all that any O these things are true.
 My little son is gone from me. H. is gone because these two young mel murdered him."
 Only Justice Cayerly can decid,
 Caverly To Decide
 whether Loeb and Leopold were vic tims of strange thought creatures, un l able to help themselves and compelled by circumstances over which they haC no control to do murder.
 Lately the lines of his face and hi expressions have shown that he la bored under a, heavy strain, the strail of deciding whether two youths, de clared by one set of physicians to b, irresponsible, and by another to b. responsible and normal, shall hang Perhaps by the first part of next weel the world will know whether Loel and Leopold shall go to the gallow for their acts, or whether they mere ly vii be confined because they hay been proved creatures of strange an, destructive forces that operated upol