The Defense of Henry Sweet :: Essays Papers

The Defense of Henry Sweet For this assignment, I found a speech that was addicted by a famous defense attorney named Clarence Darrow. This speech is his closing remarks to the all-white gore in defense of a black man named Henry Sweet. The ravel took place in Detroit, Michigan in May of 1926. Henry Sweet was accused of first-degree murder. I chose this text for my paper because it had more persuasive techniques in it than anything else I came across. Which is to be expected, because after all, the whole purpose of the speech was to persuade the jury. One of the techniques that this speech has an abundance of is the use of purr words. Darrow referred to the jury numerous times as being the kindly, decent, and most humane people of the society. He referred to the jury selection process by saying, it took us a week to interpret you, a week of culling out the prejudice and hatred. Probably we did not cull it all out at that, but we took the best and the faires t that we could find. The question that immediately came to my look when I read that was, best and fairest of what/who? There were many instances like these throughout the speech. Darrow also made use of labels in the same way. By saying to the jury that he believed they were fair, fair(a), and unprejudiced, he was trying to program them to overlook the fact that the defendant was black, (which, of course, was a very big deal back thenespecially to the all-white jury). Darrow say at one point, you know that if white men had been fighting their way against colored men, nobody would have dreamed of prosecution. And that from the beginning of this case to the end the prosecution is based on race prejudice and nothing else. He based his whole speech on prejudice (and an argument against it) and the labels that he gave the jury were just one of many ways he did this. Darrow also referred to Henry Sweet as a boy on numerous occasions. Sweet was a big(a) man, bu t by labeling him as a boy, it made him seem more innocent and faultless to his audience.