Darrow’s sympathetic tone touches the audience’s hearts with a poetic rhythm in his words. As he gradually changes the jury’s perception towards his defendants Darrow is better positioned to win their empathy. In 1906, he defends a leader of the Western Federation of Miners union charged with bombing and killing the governor of Idaho. During his trial, he recalls that before the WFM, “men worked for 12 hours….their bones twisted. They become helpless, crippled and paralytic...the smelters vomited forth poison and death. And the western federation set to...correct these evils…”(“Essential Words and Writings” 53). Darrow applies figurative diction to paint a bleak picture of the worker’s environment. The use of “bones twisted” and the dysphemism
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As a defense lawyer, Darrow strongly appeals to the jury’s emotion. During the Leopold and Loeb trial, he asks the jury why they had killed Franks? “Not for money, not for spite; not for hate. They killed him as they might kill a spider or a fly, for the experience...and those unfortunate lads sit here hated, despised, outcasts, with the community shouting for their blood (“Leopold & Loeb” par 38). Darrow uses the metaphor created between the bloodshed of a spider and the murder of a human being to remind the jury of their once instinctive kill of a spider; he seeks to connect the the jury and the two killers through a shared experience and thus, evoke a sense of understanding. Furthermore, Darrow’s choice of words: “hated,despised” creates a melancholy tone that reveals the boys as victims rather than murderers, which enables the jury to feel empathy towards them. Along with diction, the anaphoras create a poetic rhythm; Darrow repeatedly emphasizes that the boys were mentally ill and had no motif for murder to make the jury more understanding. Darrow continues, as he tells the court he can imagine “taking two boys...irresponsible, weak, diseased, penning them in a cell, checking off the days and the hours and the minutes, until they will
As a defense lawyer, Darrow strongly appeals to the jury’s emotion. During the Leopold and Loeb trial, he asks the jury why they had killed Franks? “Not for money, not for spite; not for hate. They killed him as they might kill a spider or a fly, for the experience...and those unfortunate lads sit here hated, despised, outcasts, with the community shouting for their blood (“Leopold & Loeb” par 38). Darrow uses the metaphor created between the bloodshed of a spider and the murder of a human being to remind the jury of their once instinctive kill of a spider; he seeks to connect the the jury and the two killers through a shared experience and thus, evoke a sense of understanding. Furthermore, Darrow’s choice of words: “hated,despised” creates a melancholy tone that reveals the boys as victims rather than murderers, which enables the jury to feel empathy towards them. Along with diction, the anaphoras create a poetic rhythm; Darrow repeatedly emphasizes that the boys were mentally ill and had no motif for murder to make the jury more understanding. Darrow continues, as he tells the court he can imagine “taking two boys...irresponsible, weak, diseased, penning them in a cell, checking off the days and the hours and the minutes, until they will