The prosecution rested its case on November 14. Hays opened for the defense by citing PEOPLE v. AUGUSTUS POND, a landmark Michigan case from 1860. It had ruled that a man could employ any necessary method to defend his home, including homicide.

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Darrow then went to work. He hammered home the point that his clients acted in self-defense and that "one is justified in defending himself when he apprehends that his life is in danger and when that apprehension is based upon reason." Explaining that Michigan law defined a mob as 12 or more armed or 30 unarmed persons, Darrow contended that his clients had ample reason to fear the whites outside the Sweet home, especially when considered in light of recent events.

Philip A. Adler, a white reporter for the Detroit News, led the parade of defense witnesses. Adler had been in the area on the night of the shooting and estimated the crowd to be 400 to 500 people. After parking his car, he recalled, he had elbowed his way through the boisterous throng. Threats against those inside the house echoed about the neighborhood, and one person told Adler that a "Negro family has moved in here and we’re going to get them out."

Darrow then called on three black witnesses who had driven together throughout the area. They compared the crowd, which had pelted their car with rocks, to "a mob of howling Indians." Darrow’s star witness, however, was Ossian Sweet. Darrow intended to quietly ask his client a few simple questions, then allow him to occupy center stage.

According to Sweet, he and his friends were playing cards at about 8:00 p.m. when "something hit the roof of the house." One of the men peered outside and saw people scurrying around the grounds, so Sweet dashed into the kitchen to check on his wife. While there he heard someone outside yell, "Go and raise hell in front; I am going back." Rocks peppered the house and Sweet grabbed a gun and ran upstairs. "Pandemonium–I guess that’s the best way to describe it–broke loose," he explained calmly. "Everyone was running from room to room. There was a general uproar."

Sweet added that the crowd moved forward "like a human sea. Stones kept coming faster. . . . Another window was smashed. Then one shot, then eight or ten from upstairs, then it was all over."

Darrow asked Sweet to describe his state of mind during the incident. Prosecutor Toms immediately jumped to his feet and objected that such material was irrelevant. Courtroom observers leaned forward in their seats, sensing that a crucial moment had arrived. Judge Murphy broke the tension by permitting the evidence on the grounds that such knowledge did have a bearing as to the defendants’ motives.

As blacks in the courtroom listened "with strained and anxious faces," Sweet spoke of growing up outside Orlando, Florida, where black-owned homes were burned and black men were killed. He referred to four brothers in Arkansas who had been yanked from a train and murdered, and to a Texas man who surrendered to police to escape a threatening mob of whites, but was then turned over to that same mob and burned at the stake.

When he opened the door to let in his brother "and saw that mob," said the soft-spoken physician, "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 peculiar type of fear–the fear of one who knows the history of my race."

In his closing argument on November 24, Moll labeled the shooting "a cowardly act" and declared that each defendant "took a hand in the killing of Breiner in cold blood." Darrow then stepped forward. His voice "tense with emotion," he argued that his clients were on trial for only one reason–the color of their skin. "If it had been a white man defending his home from a member of a Negro mob," he declared, "no one would have been arrested nor put on trial." He discounted the testimony of prosecution witnesses–"there is not an honest person in the whole bunch," he said–and he castigated the police department for its ineffective control of what the prosecution refused to call a mob. "Gentlemen, the State has put on enough witnesses who said they were there, to make a mob."

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