Meyer Levin - Compulsion

“Why, this young pervert has proclaimed since he was eleven years of age that there is no God!” He turned to Judd. “I wonder now whether you think there is a God or not!

“I wonder whether you think it is pure accident, with your Nietzschean philosophy, that you dropped your glasses, or whether it was an act of Divine Providence to visit upon your miserable carcasses the wrath of God in the enforcement of the laws of the state of Illinois.”

Then, turning back to the bench: “Well, if Your Honour please, after the Feldschers had completed my education in the psychopathic laboratories, then my good friend Jonathan Wilk took me on a Chautauqua trip with him, visiting social settlements such as the Hull House, to expound his peculiar philosophy of life, and we would meet with communists and anarchists, and Jonathan would regale them with his philosophy of the law, which means there ought not to be any law and there ought not to be any enforcement of the law.

“I don’t know whether the fact that he had a couple of rich clients who were dangerously close to the gallows prompted that trip or not.

“If Your Honour please, when I occupied the position Your Honour graces, I had an unfortunate man come before me. I don’t know whether his pineal gland was calcified or ossified. I don’t know whether he had clubfoot or not, and I did not inspect his mouth to find out whether he had a couple of baby teeth.”

He screamed, “I don’t know whether Thomas Fitzgerald developed sexually at fourteen or sixteen!

“I do know, and knew then, that under the law he had committed a dastardly crime; he had taken a little five-year-old girl, a daughter of the poor, and assaulted her and murdered her. And Mr. Wilk says that in carrying out my duty to sentence him to death I was bloodthirsty!

“The law says in extreme cases death shall be the penalty. When Mr. Wilk served in the legislature he introduced a bill to abolish capital punishment. It was defeated. If I were in the legislature I might vote either way on such a bill. I don’t know. But as a judge, I have no right to set aside the law. I have no right to defeat the will of the people, as expressed by the legislature of Illinois. I have no right to be a judicial anarchist, even if Jonathan Wilk is an anarchist advocate.

“He says that hanging does not stop murder. I think he is mistaken. From the time Thomas Fitzgerald expiated his crime upon the gallows, I have not heard of any little tot in Chicago who met a like fate to that which Janet Wilkinson met.

“He says that hanging does not stop murder. I will direct your attention to the year 1920 when we stopped a wave of lawlessness. Four judges for two months tried nothing but murder cases. In that brief period fifteen men were sentenced to death in the criminal court of Cook County.

“As a result of that, murder fell fifty-one per cent in Cook County during the year 1920.

“You have heard a lot about England. Well, I never had any liking for her laws as they applied to my ancestors and people in an adjoining isle, but I have learned to have a wholesome respect for the manner in which they enforce the laws of England.

“There, murder is murder; it is not a fantasy. Justice is handed out swiftly and surely, and as a result there are less murders in the entire kingdom of Great Britain yearly than there are in the city of Chicago!”

He stared at the boys as a man who did his duty even if the sight of the subjects made him sick.

“Call them babes? Call them children?” Horn shrieked. “Why, from the evidence in this case they are as much entitled to mercy at the hands of Your Honour as two mad dogs are entitled.

“They are no good to themselves. The only purpose that they use themselves for is to debase themselves. They are a disgrace to their honoured families and they are a menace to this country.

“The only useful thing that remains for them now in life is to go out of this life and go out of it as quickly as possible under the law!”

There came a woman’s high, hysterical wail, smothered into a sob. I looked; it wasn’t Myra. She sat tense, utterly white, her lips in-drawn.

“I think it is about time we get back into the criminal court, and realize we are here trying the murder case of the age, a case the very details of which not only astonish but fill you with horror.

“Their wealth, in my judgment, has not anything to do with this, except it permits a defence here seldom given to a man in the criminal court. Take away the millions of the Steiners and Strauses, and Jonathan Wilk’s tongue is as silent as the tomb of Julius Caesar.

“Take away their millions, and the wise men from the East would not be here, to tell you about fantasies and teddy bears and bold, bad boys who have their pictures taken in cowboy uniforms. Why, one by one, each of their doctors discarded the silly bosh that the preceding doctor had used, and finally that grand old man of the defence, Jonathan Wilk, seeing how absolutely absurd it all was, discarded all their testimony, and substituted as a defence in this case his peculiar philosophy of life.

“All right, let’s see about that philosophy.

“What are we trying here, if Your Honour please – a murder as the result of a drunken brawl, a murder committed in hot blood to avenge some injury, either real or fancied?” He went a tone higher. “A murder committed by some young gamin of the streets whose father was a drunkard and his mother loose? Who was denied every opportunity, brought up in the slums, never had a decent example set before him?

“No!

“But a murder committed by two super-intellects coming from the homes of the most respected families in Chicago. They had the power of choice, and they deliberately chose to adopt the wrong philosophy, Wilk’s philosophy! They chose to make their conduct correspond with it!

“These two defendants were perverts, Straus the victim and Steiner the aggressor, and they quarrelled.

“They had entered into a compact so that these unnatural crimes might continue. And Dr. Allwin calls that a childish compact. If Dr. Allwin is not ashamed of himself, he ought to be. My God, I was a grown man before I knew of such depravity!”

Aghast, he shrieked, “They talk about what lawyers will do for money, but my God, for a doctor to go on the witness stand and under oath characterize an unnatural agreement between these two perverts as a childish compact!

“Mitigation! Mitigation!” He backed away from it. “I have heard so many big words and foreign words in this case that I sometimes thought that perhaps we were letting error creep into the record, so many strange, foreign words were being used here, and the Constitution provides that these trials must be conducted in the English language; I do not know, maybe I have got aggravation and mitigation mixed up.”

Striding to his table, Horn seized his notes. “I have wondered, when I heard these doctors say that you could not make an adequate examination in less than twenty or thirty days, whether the fact that they were working for two hundred and fifty dollars a day did not enter into the matter.”

And it was not because he suspected the boys might be insane that he had called in State alienists. “I knew how much money they had for some kind of fancy insanity defence. And that is why I sent for the best alienist in the city of Chicago that very first day.”

What better opportunity, in God’s world, could there have been for an examination! “These two smart alecks were boasting of their depravity before they had been advised to invent fantasies.

“I am not the physician that the younger Feldscher is, nor the philosopher that the senior counsel is, but I think that if I talk to a man for four hours consecutively, and he is insane, I am going to have a pretty good suspicion of it.