Samuel Simon Leibowitz (August 14, 1893 – January 11, 1978) was a Romanian-born American criminal defense attorney, famously noted for winning the vast majority of his cases, who later became a justice of the New York State Supreme Court.
Roy Wright's trial ended in a mistrial, not because he was assumed innocent, but because due to his young age the jury could not decide whether the sentence should be death or life imprisonment.
Defense lawyer Samuel Leibowitz suggested that Price had invented the rape by the black defendants when the train they'd hopped was stopped in Paint Rock. He proposed that Price made up the charge to protect herself and Bates.
Leibowitz represented seventy-eight persons charged with first-degree murder in his fifteen-year career as a criminal defense attorney. His record showed seventy-seven acquittals, one hung jury, and no convictions.
The case marked the first stirrings of the civil rights movement and led to two landmark Supreme Court rulings that established important rights for criminal defendants. Nine young black Alabama youths – ranging in age from 12 to 19 – were charged with raping two white women near the small town of Scottsboro, Alabama.
Leibowitz had found a witness, a drifter named Lester Carter, who claimed that he knew where Price and Bates had really been the night before the train ride, with himself and a friend in a hobo camp near the train yards.
What did Haywood Patterson say caused the fight on the train? A white man said this is a white man train. What did Victoria Price spend time in the workhouse for, and how many times had she been married?
In the first confusing minutes after the arrests, Ruby Bates whispered to officials that she and her friend, Victoria Price, had been raped by the nine Negroes, who ranged m age from twelve to nineteen. A hasty medical examination revealed evidence of sexual intercourse.
Because of his impeccable record, Leibowitz was hired by the International Labor Defense to defend the young black men accused at Scottsboro; the I.L.D. could hardly be accused of wanting to martyr the boys for their cause after hiring a lawyer that some considered the next Clarence Darrow.
What happened to Sam Leibowitz during the fourth trial? He left the case.
The NAACP thought the I.L.D. was using the Scottsboro case as propaganda for the cause of communism; the I.L.D. thought the NAACP was too moderate, willing to collaborate with the ruling class for small gains.