It goes without doubt that several well-distinguished crimes have to do
with the issue of ethics in terms of the final legal judgement. Some of them
were associated with whether those who killed and eaten their friends for
survival with the agreement of all of them were guilty. Some of them were
germane to the motives of committing the crimes. Shortly after we discussed
about Linda Pastan’s “Ethics” in class, I enjoyed a two-hour drama, “Never
the Sinner,” which detailed the true story of Leopold and Loeb, also dubbed
“trial of the century,” and its controversy.
Nathan Freudenthal Leopold, Jr. and Richard A. Loeb, commonly known as
"Leopold and Loeb," murdered a 14-year-old boy named Bobby Franks only because
they wished desperately to prove Nietzschean supermen theroy by committing
the “perfect crime” when Leopold was 19 and Loeb 18 in 1924. Both being
extremely intelligent, they believed that they were the “superman incarnation
” described by Nietzsche, the German philosopher, and they were able to do
anything without the slightest negative consequences or responsibility. They
randomly picked the boy and brutally ended his life with a chisel and a sock
inside a car, and they defigured the corpse by pouring hydrochloric acid on it
before disposing it in a culvert at the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks near
118th street.
Those two boys were perfectly unsuspected before Leopold’s golden
eyeglasses was found beside Bobby Franks’s body and their calm assertions
greatly prolonged the trial. Clarence Darrow, the well-known, 67-year-old
lawyer who opposed to the capital punishment was hired to defend those two
boys. Darrow claimed that Leopold and Loeb did make a mistake, but they were,
judging from their motivation, “never the sinner.” He also insisted that we
could not put two boys who practiced philosophy taught at the university to
death. Darrow emphasized the fact that those young boys intended to “prove”
instead of to kill. The final judgement may be one of the successes for
Clarence Darrow- Nathan Freudenthal Leopold, Jr. and Richard A. Loeb were
sentenced each to life imprisonment for the murder and 99 years for the
kidnapping. Still, the case was heatedly debated owing to its relationship
with various ethical issues.