worked himself up to the rank of lieutenant in the Navy, respected, courageous, intelligent. Eight months ago his attractive wife was known and respected and admired by the community. Eight months ago Massie and his wife went to a dance, young, happy. Today, they are in a criminal court and you twelve men are asked to send them to prison for life.”
He began to slowly pace before them.
“We contend that for months Lt. Massie’s mind had been affected by grief, sorrow, trouble, day after day, week after week, month after month. What do you think would have happened to any one of you, under the same condition? What if your wife were dragged into the bushes, and raped by four or five men?”
He paused, leaned against the rail of the box. “Thalia Massie was left on that lonely road in pain and agony and suffering. Her husband hears from her bruised lips a story as terrible, as cruel, as any I’ve heard—isn’t that enough to unsettle any man’s mind?”
He turned and walked toward the defense table; stood before Tommie and Thalia and said, “There have been people who have spread around in this community vile slanders. They concocted these strange, slanderous stories, and what effect did they have on this young husband? Going back and forth, nursing his wife, working all day, attending her at night. He lost sleep. He lost hope.”
Darrow turned back to the jury as he gestured with an open hand toward Tommie. “Our insane asylums are filled with men and women who had less cause for insanity than he had!”
He ambled back to them, hands in the pockets of his baggy pants. “In time, five men were indicted for the crime. Tommie was in the courtroom during the trial of the assailants. A strange circumstance indeed that the jury disagreed in that case. I don’t know why, I don’t see why, but the jury did their work and they disagreed. Months passed, and still this case was not retried.”
He again gestured toward the defense table, this time indicating Mrs. Fortescue. “Here is the mother. They wired to her and she came. Poems and rhymes have been written about mothers, but I want to call your attention to something more basic than that: Nature. I don’t care whether it’s a human mother, a mother of beasts or birds of the air, they are all alike. To them there is one all-important thing and that is a child that they carried in their womb.”
Now he gestured with both hands at the stiffly noble Mrs. Fortescue.
“She acted as every mother acts, she felt as your mothers have felt. Everything else is forgotten in the emotion that carries her back to the time..,” and now he motioned to Thalia, “…when this woman was a little baby in her arms whom she bore and she loved.”
The sound of rustling handkerchiefs indicated tears were again flowing among the ladies of the gallery.
Darrow looked from face to face among the jurymen. “Life comes from the devotion of mothers, of husbands, loves of men and women, that’s where life comes from. Without this love, this devotion, the world would be desolate and cold and take its lonely course around the sun alone!” He leaned against the rail again. “This mother took a trip of five thousand miles, over land and sea, to her child. And here she is now, in this courtroom, waiting to go to the penitentiary.”
He rocked back on his heels and his voice rose to a near shout: “Gentlemen, if this husband and this mother and these faithful boys go to the penitentiary, it won’t be the first time that such a structure has been sanctified by its inmates. When people come to your beautiful islands, one of the first places they will wish to see is the prison where the mother and the husband are confined, to marvel at the injustice and cruelty of men and pity the inmates and blame Fate for the persecution and sorrow that has followed this family.”
Now his voice became gentle again as he began to pace before them. “Gentlemen, it was bad enough that the wife was raped. That vile stories circulated, causing great anxiety and agony in this young couple. All this is bad enough. But now you are asked to separate them, to send the husband for the rest of his life to prison.”
His voice began to rise in timbre, gradually, and now he faced the gallery and the members of the press, saying, “There is, somewhere deep in the feelings and instincts of all men, a yearning for justice, an idea of what is right and what is wrong, of what is fair, and this came before the first law was written and will abide before the last law is dead.”
Again he moved to the defense table; he stopped before Tommie. “Poor young man. He began to think of vindicating his wife from this slander. It was enough she’d been abused by these…men. Now she had been abused by talk.” His eyes traveled back to the jury and his voice was reasonableness itself: “He wanted to get a confession. To get somebody imprisoned? For revenge? No—that did not concern him. He was concerned with the girl.” And now Darrow looked affectionately at Thalia. “The girl he had taken in marriage when she was sixteen. Sweet sixteen….”
He returned to Mrs. Fortescue, made a sweeping gesture, saying, “The mother, too, believed it necessary to get a confession. The last thing they wanted to do was shoot or kill. They formed a plan to take Kahahawai to their house and have him confess. They never thought of it as illegal…it was the ends they thought of, not the means.”
Now he positioned himself before Jones and Lord. “And these two common seamen, are they bad? There are some human virtues that are unfortunately
He swiveled and pointed a finger at a random male face in the crowd. “If you needed a friend to help you out of a scrape, would you wait outside a prayer meeting Wednesday night…I guess that’s the right night…”
There was a murmur of laughter at this wry uncertainty from the country’s most famous agnostic.
“Or would you take one of these sailors? They did not want to kill, they made no plan to kill. And the house where they took Kahahawai was not a good place to kill—one family thirty feet away, another house twenty-five feet away. A lovely place to kill someone, isn’t it?”
Solemnly he faced Mr. and Mrs. Kahahawai, in their usual spot in the front. “I would do nothing to add to the sorrow of the mother and father of the boy. They have human feelings. I have, too.” Wheeling toward the jury, he pointed a finger that was not quite accusing. “I want you to have human feelings. Any man without human feelings is without life!”
Sighing, he began prowling before the bench. He seemed almost to be talking to himself. “I haven’t always had the highest opinion of the average human being. Man is none too great at best. He is moved by everything that reaches him. Tommie has told you that there was no intention of killing.”
His voice climbed again.
