by Meyer Levin
“What did she mean?” Horn demanded. “She meant that a mob ought to take charge of such a beast! Yes! We have heard Mr. Wilk talk repeatedly of the hoarse cry of the angry mob. Well, there is no danger or no fear of us actually hearing the hoarse cry of the angry mob, if the extreme penalty is visited here. I am not so sure, otherwise!”
He paused, head down, like a fighter aiming for the kill. Swinging his chunky body, Horn demanded, what of the tender friendship between these two perverts? Hadn’t Artie again and again contemplated killing Judd? This fact was all over the report.
“In other words, all this king-and-slave fantasy is a pure figment of the imagination of the defence. The real tie that binds in this case is that one was a criminal, the other had something on him. Straus was afraid of exposure: he contemplated murdering Steiner. And the other blackmailed him, for perversion. Straus wanted to shut the mouth of Steiner and then break with him. For that he needed something on Steiner. That is why he wanted Steiner to help him choke the life out of little Paulie Kessler.”
Horn threw down the Storrs-Allwin report, as something demolished. “That is the medical defence in this case. Mr. Wilk has read you poetry. May I be permitted, if Your Honour please, to read you some prose?”
And he read, “‘The White House, Washington, D.C.’”
It was a letter denying an appeal from a death sentence. “‘I have scant sympathy with a plea of insanity advanced to save a man from the consequence of his crime, when, unless that crime had been committed, it would have been impossible to persuade any reasonable authority to place him in an asylum as insane.’” The signature was that of Theodore Roosevelt.
“Is not that the case here?” Horn demanded. “If this crime had not been committed, could any reasonable authority be persuaded to send either one of these men to an asylum as insane?”
Thus he ended his first day.
There remained Wilk’s plea of youthfulness. Was eighteen too young to die? Fresh in the morning, Horn began: “I submit, if Your Honour please, if we can take the flower of American manhood, take boys at eighteen years of age and send them to their death in the front-line trenches of France in defence of our laws, we have an equal right to take men nineteen years of age and take their lives for violating these laws that these boys gave up their lives to defend.
“The law that Your Honour is bound to enforce in this case declares that from fourteen years of age up a boy has the capacity to commit a crime and is entirely and thoroughly responsible for it.”
Then, like a litany, he began reading the names and ages of men who had been hanged. It seemed to go on for ever. Buff Higgins was hanged at the age of twenty-three. Henry Foster, twenty-four, Viana, seventeen…
And if but few of them had been hanged on a plea of guilty the reason was simple. Obviously, if a lawyer could not get assurance of a deal through the State’s Attorney, he would say, “Well then, I am going to take a chance on twelve men. They can’t do any worse to me, and I’m going to give my client a run for his money.”
Why hadn’t it been done this time? Because the crime was so subhuman, as the defence itself had admitted, that they simply could not go before a jury.
And Horn began his ultimate portrayal of the crime, the blows on the head, the suffocation, and working himself up to hoarse, staccato shrieks; “And then what did the fiends, the perverts, do to that dead boy in the car? Did not the coroner’s physician testify-”
To the banging gavel, Horn stopped. Quite calmly he dropped that point and said, “I think, if Your Honour please, I have now covered the three defences set forth by Mr. Wilk: the defence of mental disease, the question of motive, the defence of youthfulness. But the real defence in this case is Jonathan Wilk and his peculiar philosophy of life. When I was listening to Mr. Wilk plead for mercy for these two men who showed no mercy, it reminded me of the story of Abraham Lincoln, about a young boy of approximately their age, whose parents were wealthy, and he murdered both of them so as to inherit their money. His crime was discovered the same as this crime has been discovered, and the court asked him for any reason why the sentence of death should not be passed on him, and he promptly replied that he hoped the court would be lenient to a poor orphan.
“Mr. Wilk quoted considerable poetry to you, and I would like again to be indulged while I read a little bit of prose.”
He picked up a printed sheet. It was an address, he explained, delivered to the prisoners in the county jail by a distinguished criminologist. Horn read, “‘The reason I talk to you on the question of crime, its cause and cure, is because I really do not believe the least in crime. There is no such thing as a crime, as the word is generally understood. I do not believe that there is any sort of distinction between the moral condition in and out of jail. One is just as good as the other. The people here can no more help being here than the people outside can avoid being outside. I do not believe that people are in jail because they deserve to be.’”
The courtroom was abuzz as people told each other what Horn was quoting. He read more slowly, in an unmistakable imitation of Jonathan Wilk’s reflective, pleading manner: “‘I believe that progress is purely a question of pleasurable units that we get out of life. The pleasure-and-pain theory is the only correct theory of morality and the only way of judging life.’” Horn looked up. “Isn’t that exactly the doctrine of Judd Steiner? And that is the doctrine expounded last Sunday in the press of Chicago by Jonathan Wilk!”
This was scarcely an exact statement. The piece had been dug up by Mike Prager, from a report of a sensational talk given at the county jail by Jonathan Wilk, twenty years before.
Judd was glowing at Wilk. Yet it seemed to me that Wilk withdrew into himself, that he perhaps wanted to separate himself from these long-ago words that suddenly linked him to Judd. For even in this closing moment of the trial I had the impression that Wilk could not bring himself to any warmth toward Judd or Artie; he pitied them, he was their defender in all sincerity, but they had not entered his heart.
The judge was leaning forward, staring at Horn in a quizzical manner. He seemed on the point of asking, Was it Wilk, or the defendants, that Horn wanted to hang?
There was indeed a feeling that the judge was a man who tended to Wilk’s way of thought; all through the trial, Horn had made no effort to conceal that he saw the judge as a man like Wilk. And he seemed to be attacking the judge himself as he again shouted, “The real defence in this case is Jonathan Wilk’s dangerous philosophy of life!
“Society can endure, the law can endure, and criminals may escape, but if a court such as this court should say that he believes in the doctrine of Jonathan Wilk, that you ought not to hang when the law says you should, a greater blow has been struck to our institutions than by a hundred, aye, a thousand murders!”
The judge still eyed him with that curious, measuring look. And Horn, with a guttural growl of frustration and despair, flung in a last taunt, one that he had perhaps meant to hold back: “Mr. Wilk has preached in this case that one of the handicaps the defendants are under is that they are the sons of multimillionaires. I would not bring it up if Mr. Wilk had not brought it up. But he tried to make Your Honour believe that Sergeant McNamara lied about Judd Steiner’s statement that his father’s millions could find a friendly judge.”
There was that peculiar atmosphere in the room, foretelling that something ineradicable was on the way, something that Horn could no longer stop himself from doing.
Horn faced the judge, eye to eye. “Did Sergeant McNamara lie?” he demanded. “I don’t know whether Your Honour believes this officer of the law or not, but I want to tell you, if you have observed these two defendants sitting before you during this trial, if you have observed the conduct of their attorneys and their families with one honourable exception – and that is the old man who sits in sackcloth and ashes and who is entitled to the sympathy of everybody, old Mr. Steiner – with that one honourable exception, everybody connected with this case” – he drew br
eath and shrieked, his arms chopping the air – “they all have laughed and sneered and jeered! And if the defendant, Steiner, did not say that he would plead guilty before a friendly judge, why, his actions demonstrated that he thinks he has got one!”
The words hung in the hot, static air.
Judge Matthewson arose, stared at him, then sat down. “I will disregard what you have said.”
The shock of Horn’s running beyond the point of recall had been so great that those at the defence table did not even seem to enjoy their gain.
Horn finished hurriedly. “I believe that the facts and circumstances proven in this case demonstrate that a crime has been committed by these two defendants and that no other punishment except the extreme penalty of the law will fit, and I leave the case with you on behalf of the state of Illinois, and I ask Your Honour in the language of Holy Writ to ‘execute justice and righteousness in the land’.”
Judge Matthewson seemed not to have heard Horn’s final words, engaged as he had been in an effort of self-control.
“Before the State rests,” he said, “the court will order stricken from the record the closing remark of the State’s Attorney as being a cowardly and dastardly assault upon the integrity of this court.”
Horn’s voice was half-choked with chagrin, rage, defeat. “It was not so intended, Your Honour.”
The judge disregarded him. “It could not be used for any other purpose except to incite a mob and to try and intimidate this court.”
“If Your Honour please, the state’s attorney had no such intention.”
The entire courtroom was electric, the boys sitting up with a frightened hope, a realization that something entirely extraneous was happening, perhaps a break that would save their lives.
“I merely wanted to put my personal feelings plainly before the court,” Horn insisted. “It was my intention as the State’s Attorney-”
“The State’s Attorney knew that his words would be heralded all through this country and all over this world.”
“It was not my intention.”
“This court will not be intimidated by anybody at any time or place as long as he occupies this position.” The judge sat back.
After a moment he announced, “I am going to take this case under advisement, gentlemen. I have practically two thousand pages of exhibits. It will take some time to prepare to decide this matter and to render judgment in this case. I think I ought to have ten days or so, and I will fix the day as September ten.” He arose. “We will adjourn this case now until September the tenth at nine-thirty o’clock.”
During those ten days the intense and fantastic absorption with the case increased rather than abated. We were beset with rumours; there were threats to bomb the judge’s home, to kill him should he fail to hang the criminals.
Nor was Judd silent. If the sentence were death, the execution, according to the Illinois law, could take place in a few months’ time. His mind seemed to be churning at greater speed, to produce some proof of the importance of his life.
He released, now, the list of questions he would attempt to solve from the other side of death, should there prove to be an after-life. These were his questions:
Is human experience carried on in any form of consciousness after death?
Is there complete omniscience?
Are the cultural experiences of the earth necessary? What of the savage mind?
Is the absence of a physical being an advantage?
Does one retain reactions registered on the mind previous to death?
Is life on earth correct in judgment, or is there a higher judgment?
What is happiness?
ON THE MORNING of the sentencing, mounted police circled the building. The crowd was immense. Precisely at nine-thirty all were in their places in the courtroom, and Judge Matthewson appeared. Among us of the press, Prager and his friends were loud with dire predictions. That was a real mob out there. If the verdict proved short of death the boys would never get out of the building alive.
I could not feel it as a lynch mob, though I was not without uneasiness. Since then, I see it more like a crowd waiting for the outcome of a desperately fought election. In it there was a feverish having-to-know. I’ve talked about it with wiser and more learned men than myself, and I realize that it was not so much the act of decision that was awaited, not so much the who-wins, but the disposition, in terms of our own selves. In each there must have been identification; in each, the hidden sense that the disposition would symbolically apply to his own darkest impulse. If I let myself do something even as awful as this, how much would I be punished? Would I die for it?
We all rose for the entry of the judge. After the swift formalities, the boys stood before him, between Wilk and Ferdinand Feldscher, and as the judge met their eyes it was still impossible to know whether he brought them death or life. Artie was utterly pale, his cheeks twitched. Judd was impassive.
Judge Matthewson read:
“In view of the profound and unusual interest that this case has aroused not only in this community but in the entire country and even beyond its boundaries, the court feels it is his duty to state the reasons which have led him to the determination he has reached.
“It is not an uncommon thing that pleas of guilty are entered in criminal cases, but almost without exception in the past such pleas have been the result of a virtual agreement between the defendants and the State’s Attorney; and in the absence of special reasons to the contrary, it is the practice of the court to follow the recommendations of the State’s Attorney.
“In the present case the situation is a different one. A plea of guilty has been entered by the defence without a previous understanding with the prosecution, and without any advance knowledge whatever on his part.” Moreover, the judge pointed out, the plea of guilty in this case did not make the task of the prosecution easier “by substituting the admission of guilt for a possibly difficult or uncertain chain of proof”. For in this case the State already had ample proof of guilt, besides full confessions.
Death, then?
There were two crimes – murder and kidnapping for ransom. In both, he pointed out, it was the court’s duty under the statute to examine witnesses as to aggravation and mitigation. “This duty has been fully met. The testimony introduced, both by the prosecution and the defence, has been as detailed and elaborate as though the case had been tried before a jury.”
Then came the disposition of another point – was it for Horn? “The testimony has satisfied the court that the case is not one in which it would have been possible to set up successfully the defence of insanity as insanity is defined and understood by the established law of this state for the purpose of the administration of criminal justice.
“The court, however, feels impelled to dwell briefly on the mass of data produced as to the physical, mental, and moral condition of the two defendants. They have been shown in essential respects to be abnormal; had they been normal they would not have committed the crime.”
The very words of Wilk!
“It is beyond the province of this court, as it is beyond the capacity of humankind in its present state of development, to predicate ultimate responsibility for human acts.
“At the same time, the court is willing to recognize that the careful analysis made of the life history of the defendants and of their present mental, emotional, and ethical condition has been of extreme interest and is a valuable contribution to criminology.”
Surely, it was a decision for the defence.
“And yet the court feels strongly that similar analyses made of other persons accused of crime will probably reveal similar or different abnormalities. The value of such tests seems to lie in their applicability to crime and criminals in general.
“Since they concern the broad question of human responsibility and legal punishment and are in no wise peculiar to the individual defendants, they may be deserving of legislative but not of judicial consideration. For this reason the cour
t is satisfied that his judgment in the present case cannot be affected thereby.”
Then it was for Horn; it was over.
“The testimony in this case reveals a crime of singular atrocity. It is, in a sense, inexplicable, but is not thereby rendered less inhuman or repulsive. It was deliberately planned and prepared for during a considerable period of time. It was executed with every feature of callousness and cruelty.” He raised his eyes, and spoke with another kind of pain, of the man who must touch some of the filthiest things of life. He spoke “not for the purpose of extenuating guilt, but merely with the object of dispelling a misapprehension that appears to have found lodgment in the public mind”. It was on the most gruesome point of all. He was convinced “by conclusive evidence that there was no abuse offered to the body of the victim”.
He returned to his paper. “But it did not need that element to make the crime abhorrent to every instinct of humanity, and the court is satisfied that neither in the act itself, nor in its motives or lack of motives, can he find any mitigating circumstances.”
Death, for certain?
The judge reviewed the possible punishments under the statutes. For murder, death, or fourteen years to life in jail. For kidnapping, death, or from five years to life imprisonment.
“Under the plea of guilty, the duty of determining the punishment devolved upon the court, and the law indicates no rule or policy for the guidance of his discretion. In reaching his decision the court would have welcomed the counsel and support of others. Nevertheless the court is willing to meet his responsibilities.
“It would have been the task of least resistance to impose the extreme penalty of the law.”
Then it was life!
Already, smiles were breaking, but Judd and Artie did not dare to breathe. “In choosing imprisonment instead of death, the court is moved chiefly by the consideration of the age of the defendants, boys of eighteen and nineteen years.”
