When I was in my mid teens, there was quite an uproar about him - a campaign to get him paroled from an Illinois prison where he was serving a life term for murder.
It wasn’t just any murder; at the time it was committed, in 1924, and thereafter, it was called “the crime of the century.’’
Leopold, who was 19, and his friend Richard Loeb, who was 18, had superior intellects, but they also had an abnormal relationship that, among other things, involved a fascination with the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and a fantasy about being “supermen” who were above the law.
To prove that to themselves, they murdered 14-year-old Robert Franks.
The State of Illinois did not think the young men were above the law, Nietzsche notwithstanding, and both were sentenced to life in prison plus 99 years for kidnapping.
They escaped the gallows only because of the skill of their attorney, Clarence Darrow.
Loeb was killed in a prison fight in 1936, but Leopold thrived behind bars, teaching classes to other inmates, designing a new plan for prison education, reorganizing the prison library, and working in the prison hospital. During World War II, he volunteered, along with other inmates, to take part in an evaluation of anti-malaria drugs, each inmate receiving 10 bites from mosquitoes carrying the disease.
For his own edification, he also mastered 27 languages.
Leopold was paroled in 1958 and moved to Puerto Rico, where he was married and earned a master’s degree.
He worked as a technician in a hospital under the sponsorship of the Brethren Service Commission - a function of the Church of the Brethren.
Leopold was already an authority on birds when he and Loeb murdered Robert Franks. In Puerto Rico, he continued his study of ornithology and wrote a book about the birds on the island.
He died in 1971.
Leopold and Loeb, neither of them yet 20 years of age, might well have hanged if Clarence Darrow had not taken control of their case.
In view of what Leopold accomplished in prison and afterward, his history raises the question still asked today - whether one more death would have been a better outcome.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church affirms the state’s right to resort to capital punishment “if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor.’’
But the Catechism goes on to say that authorities should stick to non-lethal punishment if it is sufficient to protect public safety.
The Catechism continues: “Today, in fact, as a consequence of the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm - without definitely taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself - the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity ‘are very rare, if not practically nonexistent.’ ’’
“The possibility of redeeming himself” is a significant phrase, because among the things that make the death penalty repugnant is that it is fundamentally pessimistic, it amounts to giving up on human lives that have all the potential for good that goes with being made in the image of God.
Our faith, founded as it is on the saving act of Jesus, is a faith of optimism, a faith in resurrection, a faith in a God who gave us life because he wanted us to live.
“Death was not God’s doing,” the Book of Wisdom says: “He takes no pleasure in the extinction of the living.”
Charles Paolino is a member of the RENEW staff and a permanent Deacon in the Diocese of Metuchen.
