Winters' Time

Résumé du livre

"On a May evening in 1927, America's most famous lawyer, Clarence Darrow, surveyed a packed Dartmouth College auditorium. The title of his lecture, "Why I Oppose Capital Punishment," was controversial. Few Americans, none with the celebrity of Darrow, favored abolition of the death penalty. For the past decade, legislatures had raced to reintroduce capital punishment where it had been abolished. States experimented with new methods of execution. Thirty miles from Hanover, New Hampshire, in neighboring Vermont, Windsor State Prison installed an electric chair to replace the gallows. Many Vermonters were awaiting the execution of John Winters, who was in the prison's "death cell." Four months earlier in a sensational trial that captured national attention, a jury had found him guilty of murdering a prominent Vermont businesswoman. Clarence Darrow's fame-as great in the celebrity-crazed Roaring Twenties as that of Charles Lindbergh or Charlie Chaplin-owed much to the public's fascination with his uncanny ability to save murderers from execution. Three years before, in a case that transfixed the nation, Darrow saved from death the wealthy precocious teenagers Leopold and Loeb, who kidnapped and murdered fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks in a thrill killing. For seventy-year-old Darrow, the Dartmouth lecture enabled him to emphasize the one principle-some said the only one-he consistently followed as a lawyer. "He has an insane desire to save life," said a colleague summarizing Darrow's half-century as "attorney for the damned." But for Clarence Darrow, the Dartmouth talk was far removed from the urgency of life-and-death representation. "Darrow Plans to Retire" headlined the New York Times a month before. He was a grandfather and if he was now to give lectures instead of trying cases, Dartmouth-his only son, Paul, was a 1904 graduate-seemed a pleasant place to start. When Darrow finished his remarks, he was surrounded by students as eager as any audience to be near fame. "One of the boys came to me and told me a lady wanted to see me and told me what it was all about. I told the boy he was crazy that no such thing could have happened," wrote Darrow to Paul, the next day. "But I told him to bring her," he continued, "and she showed me your letter. She said you were in no way to blame . . . She said she could raise a little money, and I told her I didn't want any. Of course, I will do all I can for her . . . I am sorry this has bothered you all these years." The 1904 letter the woman showed Clarence Darrow contained a promise: if ever she or her family needed help, Paul Darrow assured her that his father would assist her. Now, twenty-three years later, she was asking America's most renowned lawyer to make good on his own son's pledge. "I need your help," Mrs. Arthur Cooley told Darrow. "My nephew John Winters is on Death Row in Vermont.""-- Provided by publisher.