showcased in murder trial, 1948 Although Born to Kill faced multiple problems in 1947 with regard to its reception and distribution, RKO's production had to cope with even worse publicity in 1948, most notably with news coverage of the film's alleged connections to a homicide in Illinois. The case involved 12-year-old Howard Lang, who was charged with using a switchblade and a heavy "chunk of concrete" to kill a seven-year-old boy in Thatcher Woods outside Chicago in October 1947. At the time, Lang was the youngest person ever to be arrested and formally tried for murder in that city. The boy's initial trial, which drew widespread media attention, occurred in February 1948. Lang was convicted of the crime, and on April 20 he was sentenced to 22 years in the state penitentiary. As part of Lang's overall defense and during the successful appeal of his conviction, his lawyers informed the court that their client had seen Born to Kill less than three weeks prior to the homicide. The attorneys insisted that the violent, morally destructive aspects of the film "had affected the boy because of his emotional instability", impairing his judgement and fostering in him a form of temporary insanity. They petitioned the presiding judge to view the film himself so he could appreciate the substance of their allegation that the "gangster" film was a contributing factor in the crime. In the media's ongoing updates on the murder case, newspapers reported that allegation in articles with titles such as "Movie Blamed", "'Born to Kill' Movie Cited In Mitigation For Boy Slayer Lang", and "Court Refuses Plea of Lang Attorney To View 'Killer' Movie". Less than a year after Lang's initial sentencing, the Illinois Supreme Court overturned his conviction on the grounds that the boy was too young to understand his actions. Lang was then acquitted of the murder in a second trial held in Chicago. The end of the case, however, did not erase the additional negative attention that the trial had focused on Born to Kill and on RKO Pictures itself. In acquitting Lang in April 1949, Judge John A. Sbarbaro recommended the enactment of several new laws to help prevent such ghastly crimes by children, two of those recommendations being to restrict the content of comic books and "to censor movies to the extent of holding theater managers liable for exhibiting 'harmful pictures'". More recent assessments of the