Samuel Leibowitz defended the Scottsboro Boys without a fee

Person: Samuel Leibowitz
Lived: 1893–1978
Field: Criminal law
From: Romanian-American

The story

Samuel Leibowitz, born in Romania to a Jewish family and raised in New York, was one of the most successful criminal defence lawyers in America. Of the 140 capital cases he defended, he saved the lives of all but one client.

In March 1931 nine young Black men and boys, the youngest just 13, were pulled off a freight train in Alabama and falsely accused of raping two white women. After hasty trials in Scottsboro, eight were sentenced to death. In 1932 the US Supreme Court overturned the convictions in Powell v. Alabama because the defendants had been denied proper counsel, and the International Labor Defense asked Leibowitz to lead the defence in the new trials. He took the case in 1933 and worked on it without a fee, facing hostile crowds and openly prejudiced courtrooms.

At the Decatur retrials Leibowitz dismantled the prosecution's case in cross-examination, and one of the two accusers, Ruby Bates, came into court to testify that no rape had taken place. All-white juries convicted his clients anyway. But from the first day Leibowitz had built a record showing that Black citizens were kept off Alabama's jury rolls, and that names on the rolls produced in court had been added later.

In February 1935 he argued the point before the US Supreme Court. When Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes asked whether he could prove the names were forged, Leibowitz had the jury rolls and a magnifying glass handed up to the bench, and the justices passed them among themselves. On April 1, 1935, the Court ruled unanimously in Norris v. Alabama that the state's exclusion of Black jurors was unconstitutional, reversing the convictions. Leibowitz called it a triumph for American justice.

In 1937 Alabama dropped all charges against four of the defendants, and Leibowitz led them from the jail to a car that carried them, under police escort, to the Tennessee border. Decades later, in 2013, Alabama granted posthumous pardons to the last three Scottsboro defendants whose convictions had never been overturned or pardoned. Leibowitz later served as a judge in New York, and in later years helped Norris find work in the city.

Why it matters

Norris v. Alabama established that excluding people from juries because of their race violates the Constitution, a cornerstone of fair trials in America.

About Samuel Leibowitz

Romanian-born New York trial lawyer who defended the Scottsboro Boys without pay and won the Supreme Court ruling that barred the exclusion of Black citizens from juries.

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Samuel Leibowitz

1893–1978 · Criminal law

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