Law: Scottsboro Hero

Four young Negroes ran out of the courthouse in Decatur, Ala. at last week’s end and ducked into waiting automobiles. Following them came the nation’s current No. 1 criminal lawyer, smiling, muscular Samuel Simon Liebowitz, 43, who four years ago promised thousands of howling, cheering Negroes in Manhattan’s dark Harlem: “We’ll march those Scottsboro boys up Lenox Avenue.”

Snarled an Alabama sheriff, “Why don’t you get in there with your clients, you ?” Peering from a courthouse window, watching the motorcycle-escorted cars start on their dash for the Tennessee State line, was the rouged face of a white female named Victoria Price, 22, whose insistent tale of a nine-Negro rape in an Alabama freight car in March 1931 had made the Scottsboro Case an enduring stink in the annals of Alabama law (TIME, April 20, 1931 et seq.).

In prison at Kilby, Ala. was Negro Haywood Patterson, 24, convicted for the fourth time in January 1936 of raping Victoria Price, and sentenced to 75 years. In the jail at Birmingham were Negro Clarence Norris, 24, similarly convicted last fortnight and sentenced to death; Negro Andy Wright, 25, rape-convicted last week and sentenced to 99 years; Negro Charlie Weems, 26, rape-convicted last week and sentenced to 75 years; and Negro Ozie Powell, 22, excused from the rape charge but sentenced to 20 years for knifing a guard last year.

“We’ll appeal these cases to Hell and back!” Lawyer Liebowitz had shouted. Courthouse rumor last week was that Alabama’s Governor would commute Negro Norris’ sentence to life imprisonment, the other sentences would not be appealed, the Scottsboro Case would end. Yet notice of appeal had already been filed for Negro Norris and plans to free the others were hatching.

Back to New York, city of 1,765,000 Jews and 327,700 Negroes, to a delirious welcome went Lawyer Liebowitz and his four freed Negroes: Willie Roberson, 21, cured of a venereal disease since his 1931 arrest; Eugene Williams, 21, Roy Wright, 20; and semi-blind Olin Montgomery, 24. To Lawyer Liebowitz they were not only four innocent brands plucked from the burning, but four more celebrities added to the roll of 132 accused murderers and others whom Sam Liebowitz boasts of saving from death. He, a Jew, had dared the South’s “boll weevil bigots,” “creatures whose mouths are slits . . . whose eyes pop out at you like frogs’, whose chins drip tobacco juice, bewhiskered and filthy.” He had faced witnesses with the uneasy feeling that “one can never tell when one of those hill billies [among the spectators] will pump a six-gun at him.” He had done it all absolutely without charge or fee, paying even his own expenses. “What a glorious opportunity it was for the lot to fall to a Jew to strike a blow for the emancipation of the colored race! … It has given me a vista of 14,000,000 people … in the chains of bondage.”

Back to Manhattan and his 42nd-story office overlooking City Hall Park where his faithful investigator of 16 years service, John Terry (ne Capozucca) and his three lawyer-helpers toil, surrounded by framed pictures of “The Boss” and clients he has defended, came Lawyer Liebowitz. Refreshed by a night’s sleep at his big new eleven-room home in Brooklyn where his twin 17-year-old sons Robert and Lawrence plan for Princeton in September and his daughter Marjory, 11, practices the piano under her musical mother’s eye, Lawyer Liebowitz hurried to the defense of his latest notorious client. Sculptor Robert Irwin, accused of the Easter-Sunday murder of beauteous Veronica Gedeon et al. (TIME, July 5).

Sam Liebowitz would have been Sam Lebeau had not his immigrant father Isaac “Americanized” the family name when they reached New York from Rumania in 1897. After his graduation from Cornell Law School in 1915, young Sam was advised by a successful Jewish lawyer to change his name to Lee. “I told him to go to hell.” Two years of $35-a-week civil practice turned Lawyer Liebowitz to defending criminals. A debater and dramatic star at Cornell, he quickly found his genius to be mastering juries. A natural showman, daring, quick-witted, with expressive eyes, a mobile face, a wide-ranged resonant voice, the gift of oratory and an intuitive awareness of jury reactions, Lawyer Liebowitz’ court successes came so unbelievably as to make him appear hypnotic. The hardest case he ever had, the Max Becker prison riot murder in 1930, seemed so clear-cut against his client that when the jury brought in its verdict of not guilty, Liebowitz fainted.

Fame flamed from his footsteps. In 1925, eight years after he had freed his first pickpocket, Al Capone hired Liebowitz in connection with three sociable murders in Brooklyn’s Adonis Club. It was on Liebowitz’ advice that Capone went to prison for income tax evasions.

“Mad Dog” Vincent Coll, the “baby killer” whose careless slugs were suspected when a rampaging Manhattan machine gun ripped into a four-year-old boy asleep in his carriage, cried to Liebowitz and Liebowitz got him off. Vera Stretz shot her German lover, Dr. Fritz Gebhardt, dead. Liebowitz saved her. Violinist Mischa Rosenbaum, last April murdered his pupil and mistress, Julia Nussenbaum, in a drunken orgy, slobbered to Liebowitz. The County believed Liebowitz’ boast that they could never get a first-degree conviction, accepted a guilty plea of second-degree murder.

To Lawyer Liebowitz it is all in the day’s work. Routed from his bed at 3 a. m. last year with an offer to defend the Nancy Titterton bathtub murderer he refused with a snort of outraged morality. “I wouldn’t touch it with a ten foot pole. It’s a dirty, nasty affair. The man is a beast. The public is strongly against him. As a matter of fact that guy is sitting in the electric chair right now!”

Lawyer Liebowitz harvested headlines when he publicly offered to take over the convicted Bruno Richard Hauptmann’s case “if he will tell me the whole truth.” The world held its breath while Liebowitz interviewed Hauptmann in the death house. But nothing happened.

More like the great Clarence Darrow, unlike such fabulous criminal defenders as the late William Fallen whose jury victories were often n to i disagreements, and who was acquitted of giving a bribe to a juror although the juror, in a separate trial, had been convicted of receiving the bribe from Fallen, Lawyer Liebowitz has won his jury verdicts outright. The records disclose only one accusation of tampering with justice. In 1932 a county judge in Brooklyn dismissed an indictment based on unsupported testimony of a confessed prostitute that Liebowitz had coached her what to testify against the police stool pigeon, Chile-Acuna.

Lawyer Liebowitz’ jury miracles are for the most part based on his understanding of human reactions and on simple tricks. Witnesses who will tell the truth on big things, often lie about little ones. The police had a tight case against a holdup suspect. Although they didn’t need it to convict, they introduced the man’s own signed confession, secured at police headquarters. Fifteen police denied any third-degree methods. Liebowitz asked an old deputy chief inspector on the stand: “How long have you been a police officer?” “Thirty years.” “Did you ever beat up a prisoner to get a confession?” “No, never.” “Did you ever see a policeman beat a prisoner to get a confession?” “No, I never did.” “How long have you been a policeman?” “Thirty years.” “Did you ever tell a lie in your life?” The policeman, red in the face, stammered, “No, I never did.” The jury guffawed, gave Liebowitz an acquittal.

Another time Liebowitz got a jury to believe a murder suspect’s alibi by asking him, “What is your occupation?” “Professional pickpocket.” “How long have you been a pickpocket?” “Twenty-four years.” “If you are acquitted of this murder charge what will your occupation be in the future?” “Pickpocket.” The jury, overwhelmed by such brash honesty, believed and acquitted.

Featured in a recent movie was a trick of Liebowitz’s in the Romano murder trial. All Romano had was an alibi that he had been working in a fishmarket at the time the murder happened. The prosecutor brought in a basket of fish, held them up one by one. Romano named all wrong. The prosecution grinned, rested. Liebowitz jumped up, appealed to the Jews on the jury. Romano had been working in a kosher fish market. “Why they’re trying to convict him on Christian fish!” he thundered. The jury acquitted.

Not infallible is Sam Liebowitz’s smartness. Trying a case before mixed Italians and Irish he was trying to show up a policeman. “What’s that bulge in your hip pocket, a black-jack?” “No, it’s a handkerchief and a medal,” said the policeman, pulling out the handkerchief. “Oh, so you’re a hero, eh?” snapped Liebowitz. “No,” said the cop, pulling out a religious medal, “a Roman Catholic.”

In 1935 Lawyer Liebowitz ran for district attorney in Brooklyn, promising a vice cleanup. He was defeated by some 60,000 votes. Such causes as the Scottsboro trials, if of no elective advantage, may crown the Liebowitz career with a judgeship. As for the clients his talents have freed, not all have lived to praise him. Liebowitz sent “Mad Dog” Coll back into the streets. Brother gangsters wiped him out within a week. Convict Max Becker, missing the electric chair for the prison guard’s murder, went back to face prison guards who did not forget. The electric chair burns men. Solitary confinement burns minds. Max Becker has for some years been in the Dannemora madhouse.