ROBERT E. CROWE
(Robert Emmett Crowe)
This quotation is famous for illustrating the kind of prejudicial statements which were then allowed by prosecutors to inflame a jury and the public in general. What this prosecutor was claiming was that these to defendants should be put to death, not only because of the nature of their crime but that they didn’t believe in God, and read the works of a German Philosopher. This was one of the most famous and covered cases in the Nation and the defendants were represented by the great attorney Clarence Darrow. Yet the allegation that Leopold and Loeb were both atheists which was never proved and was irrelevant anyway. Crowe also told the jury and the public that they were followers of Nietzsche a German Philosopher and made that seem somehow evil. He counted on the vestige of anti German prejudice from the First World War which had recently ended. The defendants were highly educated young men who had books of most philosophers. They had killed another youth under very strange psychological circumstances and the entire trial was about whether they should get the death sentence.
Robert Emmett Crowe was a Chicago lawyer and politician, who is best known as the prosecutor in the 1924 Leopold and Loeb murder case. He was 45 at the time and it would shape his career.