The purpose of this paper is to perform a rhetorical analysis on Clarence DarrowÆs closing speech in his own defense, given on August 14 and 15, 1912. It will evaluate the effectiveness of the speech in terms of his winning an acquittal of the charges of suborning bribery of a juror in another case, but also in terms of his overall goals as a lawyer.
This specific speech was chosen for analysis for two reasons. First, it is clear that the speech was effective as a defense speech, because Darrow was acquitted; hence, an analysis can focus on why the speech was effective in this way. Second, the speech is nevertheless a tour de force. In other cases he argued, Darrow was in no personal danger if he lost the case, but in this situation he was in great danger; he would have gone to prison if he had been found guilty. Hence, DarrowÆs motivation for ensuring the effectiveness of the speech was necessarily much greater than in other closing arguments he had presented.
Because Darrow was the defendant in a criminal case, this was a speech that had to be given, if not by Darrow, then by Rogers, who was his counsel (Stone 335). It was not a speech that Darrow had volunteered to give for the fun of it. Darrow believed that he could be more effective in his own defense than Rogers would have been, and the results seem to have proved him right (although it is not known, of course, how the decision might have gone had Rogers done the summation).
The legal situation was that Darrow had been in Los Angeles to defend the McNamara brothers, union leaders who had been accused of being responsible for a dynamite explosion that killed twenty people in the Los Angeles Times building. Darrow had become the most famous defender of unions and other underdogs in America, ever since his first case in 1894, when he had resigned as general attorney for the Chicago and North Western Railway Company in order to defend Eugene Debs and his American ...