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Legal History

Faculty Works

Series

2007

Kidnapping

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Law

The Leopold And Loeb Trial: A Brief Account, Douglas O. Linder Jan 2007

The Leopold And Loeb Trial: A Brief Account, Douglas O. Linder

Faculty Works

Few trial transcripts are as likely to bring tears to the eyes as that of the 1924 murder trial of Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold. Decades after Clarence Darrow delivered his twelve-hour long plea to save his young clients' lives, his moving summation stands as the most eloquent attack on the death penalty ever delivered in an American courtroom. Mixing poetry and prose, science and emotion, a world-weary cynicism and a dedication to his cause, hatred of bloodlust and love of man, Darrow takes his audience on an oratorical ride that would be unimaginable in a criminal trial today. Even …


The Trial Of Richard Bruno Hauptmann, Douglas O. Linder Jan 2007

The Trial Of Richard Bruno Hauptmann, Douglas O. Linder

Faculty Works

Journalist H. L. Mencken called the trial of Bruno Hauptmann, the accused kidnapper of the baby of aviator Charles Lindbergh, the greatest story since the Resurrection. While Mencken's description is doubtless an exaggeration, measured by the public interest it generated, the Hauptmann trial stands with the O. J. Simpson and Scopes trials as among the most famous trials of the twentieth century. The trial featured America's greatest hero, a good mystery involving ransom notes and voices in dark cemeteries, a crime that is every parent's worst nightmare, and a German-born defendant who fought against U. S. forces in World War …