Rhetorical Analysis of Speech by Clarence Darrow

The purpose of this paper is to perform a rhetorical analysis on Clarence Darrow's 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, Darrow's 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).

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ake on the McNamara case at all, that he had done so out of conscience. He emphasizes that he had plea bargained the McNamara case in order to ensure that they would not be hanged--implying humility about his own skills as a defense lawyer--and that he had thus given up the large legal fees he would have earned if he had argued the case and risked losing it. He may have been here covertly referring to the fact that the unions had refused to contribute to the costs of his own trial; the jury would probably not have known this, but the public would have. He does not here deal with any of the evidence of the case, but with the facts of his own identity. He paints himself as a man of conscience, who does what is right regardless of public praise or scorn; implicitly he is urging the jury to do the same. Because he takes risks himself in order to defend the weak and defenseless, those who prey on the weak have conspired to place him in this situation in order to attempt to destroy him as an obstacle to their ruthless exercise of power. He paints himself and the jurymen as being almost pawns of fate, none of them being present by free choice, and this also is surely intended to create a sense of equality between them. Finally, by

Category: Government - R