Earl Rogers - His Cases - Clarence Darrow, 1912-1913

Clarence Darrow, 1912-1913

"Perhaps the most famous lawyer-client disagreements recorded in legal lore were the ones which developed between Clarence Darrow, indicted for attempted jury bribery in Los Angeles in 1912, and his chief counsel, legendary Los Angeles criminal lawyer Earl Rogers. The case arose out of Darrow’s defense of the McNamara brothers, labor leaders who were indicted in the 1910 dynamiting of the Los Angeles Times building in which 21 Times non-union employees were killed. Since the Times was widely considered as the most anti-labor newspaper in the country, it was universally suspected that factions in organized labor were behind the bombing. Eventually the McNamara brothers were indicted and Clarence Darrow was brought in to defend the case. The case gripped the attention of the entire nation. Before the McNamara brothers could plead guilty, however, Darrow himself was indicted by the Los Angeles District Attorney for allegedly attempting to bribe a juror. Darrow ultimately hired famed Los Angeles criminal defense lawyer Earl Rogers as his chief counsel. When the case went to trial, however, Darrow frequently disagreed with his attorney over how the case should be tried. According to the account of Adela Rogers St. Johns, Earl Rogers’ daughter, much of her father’s energy during the trial was given over to trying to convince Darrow and his wife to accept his views on how to try the case. “e had an almost daily row over Darrow’s courtroom behavior and continual scraps about the three lines of defense and which came first so that a lot of the time my father was as restless as a .400 hitter benched in the World Series.” “The drive it took for my father to control Darrow’s desire and insistance (sic) that the defense rest entirely on the conspiracy-frame-up basis was mounting into hot or icy quarrels.” “On several occasions Rogers threatened to quit him flat if he persisted in some course that Earl believed was wrong.” Significantly, Rogers was successful in getting Darrow, the great champion of organized labor, to refrain from making an argument essentially condoning the dynamiting of the Times building and the killing of 21 innocent people. Rogers and Darrow ultimately split closing argument duties. Rogers’s short summary of the evidence was business-like and to the point, emphasizing his own theory of the case that Darrow was too smart to have been involved in a bribery scheme and that he would not in any event have knowingly run across the street at the scene of the bribery and thus draw attention to his presence at the scene of the crime. Rogers gave particular attention to the report of a prosecution witness that Darrow had run across the street waving his hat. “ pranced into the corner and took his own elegant off the rack and began to wave it frantically. We saw it. Plainly. This was to be the visual, pictorial, unbelievable thing a man could not do if he was guilty, re-enacted before the jury.” After all was said and done, Darrow was acquitted in short order after a three-month trial. However, he was later indicted for allegedly attempting to bribe another juror in the McNamara brothers’ case. Earl Rogers began the second case as lead counsel but was soon forced to withdraw from the case due to health reasons. The second bribery trial ended in a hung jury, with several jurors holding out for a conviction. Rogers’ biographers have speculated that Rogers’ continued presence in the case might have controlled Darrow enough to produce a second acquittal. Without Rogers to restrain him, Darrow did what he had wanted to do in the first trial. He attempted to condone the wholesale destruction of the Times employees as a social crime rather than a horrible murder. This plea in his argument to the jury caused several members, according to their story, to hold out for conviction. The jury could not agree and was discharged. It was not until many months later that the second indictment was finally dismissed, based on Darrow’s agreement never to practice law in California again. No doubt the good judgment of Earl Rogers in convincing Darrow to forego his justification argument in the first bribery trial was an essential element in returning the Great Defender to his role as America’s leading advocate for organized labor, the poor and the oppressed. Clearly the most difficult advocating that Earl Rogers faced in the Darrow case was in convincing Darrow not to continually hurt his own case with unappealing – if not suicidal – arguments."