Sweet Trials: 1925-26

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) soon turned to Clarence Darrow for help. At the time Darrow was perhaps the nation's most celebrated attorney. Darrow, long a champion of the underdog, agreed to take the case. The first trial took place in the Detroit Recorder's Court in November 1925. The judge was the liberal and humanitarian Frank Murphy, who later became an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court. The chief prosecutor was Robert M. Toms, whom Darrow afterward described as "one of the fairest and most humane prosecutors that I ever met."

The facts of the case were unfavorable for the defendants. The crowd had been restless and abusive, yes, but no one had tried to enter Sweet's house forcibly, so under Michigan law, self-defense would nor be easy to prove. That the gunfire seemed to come in a volley, as if prearranged, indicated provocation on the part of those inside, rather than self-defense. Breiner had been shot in the back, so he himself could not have been an aggressor.

On the other hand, the prosecutors' case wasn't all that cut and dried, either, and it was mismanaged. Toms called a large number of witnesses, all of them white, to show that the "crowd" was really quite small. However, Darrow's incisive cross-examination revealed that the police had coached some, and perhaps most (if not all), of the witnesses to say this. Darrow also attacked the prosecution for relying upon the theory of conspiracy to commit murder, which the prosecution had to do since it could not prove who in the house had fired the fatal shot, much less show who had fired at all. Darrow once called conspiracy "the favorite weapon of every tyrant … an effort to punish the crime of thought."

Darrow, despite the restrictive Michigan definition, used the argument of self-defense to explain what had happened that night. Calling upon Ossian Sweet himself to tell his story, Darrow tried to make this case symbolic of earlier black persecution.

"When I saw that mob," Sweet said, "I realized in a way that I was facing that same mob that had hounded my people through its entire history. I realized my back was against the wall and I was filled with a particular type of fear—the fear of one who knows the history of my race."

After deliberating for three days, the all-white jury announced that it could not reach a verdict, and Murphy declared a mistrial. Five months later, in April 1926, Toms indicted Henry Sweet, who finally admitted to firing a gun, bringing him to trial a second time for murder. Judge Murphy again presided, and both Toms and Darrow used much the same litigation tactics that they had employed in the first trial. This time, Sweet was acquitted, and the following July Toms moved to dismiss the charges against all of the other defendants.

Although Darrow had argued more famous cases, he considered the Sweet trials to be his greatest personal triumph. The issues brought forth in these trials presaged the growing racial tensions throughout the country that would eventually give rise to the Civil Rights movement.