Background
Samuel Lebeau was taken to the United States in 1897 by his parents, who were seeking to escape anti-Semitism and whochanged their name to Leibowitz.
Samuel Lebeau was taken to the United States in 1897 by his parents, who were seeking to escape anti-Semitism and whochanged their name to Leibowitz.
He was brought up in Brooklyn, New York, and worked his way through Cornell University Law School, from which he graduated in 1915.
Upon admission to the bar in 1917 he took a position in a civil law firm because that was the “correct” job for a Cornell graduate according to the dean of the law school.
Leibowitz, however, wished to practice criminal law and volunteered his services to indigent defendants. He successfully defended numerous men and women accused of criminal actions by careful study that revealed the flaws in the prosecutor’s case, destroyed the circumstantial evidence against the defendant, and persuaded the jury to free his client.
From 1933 to 1937 he served, without fee as chief defense counsel for the nine black defendants in the Scottsboro case who were sentenced to death in Alabama for assaulting two white women. Leibowitz’s efforts resulted in a Supreme Court decision in 1935 that banned the exclusion of blacks from juries in the South. In a period of over twenty years, up to 1940, Leibowitz defended some 140 persons accused of murder. Only one was executed.
In 1940 Leibowitz was elected judge in Kings County Court in Brooklyn. He served in that post until 1961. During his tenure, he was presiding judge at the Brooklyn grand jury investigations of graft in the New York City Police Department and of racketeering on the Brooklyn waterfront. From 1961 to 1969 he served as a New York supreme court justice; he imposed severe sentences on criminals and fought corruption. He was active in Jewish affairs, as president of the United Organization for Israel Pioneers, and in 1948 organized the first visit of an Israeli soccer team to New York.