The most important case of Leibowitz’s career, and one that solidified his stature as a champion of the underdog and human rights and enhanced his reputation far beyond New York City, began for him in Alabama in 1933. Two years earlier, in a miscarriage of justice that was all too typical in the segregated South, nine young African American men, who ranged in ages from 12 to 19, were convicted in trials held in the town of Scottsboro, Alabama (about 100 miles north of Birmingham) for allegedly raping two white girls, Victoria Price, 21, and Ruby Bates, 17, aboard a freight train traveling through Alabama on its way to Memphis. The “Scottsboro Boys,” as they became known (only four of them knew each other) also had fought with several young white men who had been on the train. The white teenagers, who had lost the fight, then reported this altercation to the police after they hopped off the train—the start of the Scottsboro Boys’ legal nightmare. The nine claimed they were innocent of raping the two girls, and they were. But all of them—except 12-year-old Roy Wright, who was granted a mistrial—were sentenced to death. (Considering that 299 African Americans were lynched in Alabama from 1882 to 1968, “the fact that the [young men in Scottsboro] were not immediately lynched,” lawyer Alan Dershowitz has written, “demonstrated some degree of progress …”)

The two girls had concocted the story about the rape to avoid getting in trouble for vagrancy and having illegal sexual relations. Early in 1932, a letter from Ruby Bates to a boyfriend was made public in which she denied having been raped. Nonetheless, a few months later the Alabama Supreme Court in a 6-to-1 vote upheld the convictions of seven of the defendants (the conviction of 13-year-old Eugene Williams was reversed because he was a juvenile in 1931). In November 1932, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned that ruling and deemed that the defendants were denied their right to counsel, which violated their right to due process under the 14th Amendment. The cases were remanded to the lower court, which meant new trials had to be held. In January 1933, the International Labor Defense, an organization with ties to the Communist Party, recruited Leibowitz to take charge of the defense in the new trials.

“I shall remain active in this cause as long as there is a breath of life in me,” Leibowitz told a writer from the Jewish Daily Bulletin. “It is not the cause of the Negro alone, it is the cause of my own people!” He added, “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! … Believe me, I’ll do all in my power to reflect credit on my people in the fight we’re waging.” He also no doubt recognized that participating in such widely covered legal proceedings and championing African Americans’ legal rights would “add to the realm of his renown,” as his son Robert later wrote.

It was a protracted fight. For more than five years, Leibowitz battled witnesses who openly lied. While Ruby Bates eventually recanted her testimony, Victoria Price refused to do so for the rest of her life. Leibowitz’s cross-examination of Price was especially harsh, but he felt it necessary to expose her lies. He faced racist judges and prosecutors, confronted illegal court procedure rulings, and regularly received death threats. During the first of several trials, speakers at rallies near the Jackson County courthouse inflamed the crowd who called for the young men to be lynched and Leibowitz and other lawyers assisting him to be tarred and feathered. A pamphlet circulated with the title “Kill the Jew From New York.” In his summation to the jury, assistant prosecutor County Solicitor Wade Wright made no attempt to hide his antisemitism. “Show them,” he told the all-white jury members, “that Alabama justice cannot be bought and sold with Jew money from New York.”

In the end, it was a bittersweet legal victory for Leibowitz, who eventually had had enough. Not one to lose his temper in front of a jury, he declared during one of the final trials that he was “sick and tired of the sanctimony and hypocrisy of the state and people of Alabama.” Back in New York, he was hailed for standing up to Southern bigotry.

In February 1935, Leibowitz appeared before the Supreme Court; it was the first and single time he ever did so. He ultimately won a ruling when the court found that the exclusion of African Americans on Alabama jury rolls—despite assertions to the contrary by Jackson County officials—deprived Black defendants of their rights to equal protection under the law as guaranteed in the 14th Amendment. Though in subsequent trials in Scottsboro and throughout the South, unscrupulous legal officials attempted to get around the law, they were unable to prevent African Americans from serving on juries, especially in cases with African American defendants. That ruling was rightly part of Leibowitz’s legacy. At the same time, and notwithstanding the ruling in his favor by the U.S. Supreme Court and Leibowitz’s best efforts, several of the Scottsboro Boys were convicted and served prison time until Alabama state officials were prepared to concede that they had indeed incarcerated innocent men. The lives of each were changed forever by hate and false testimony. It took more than eight decades, until November 2013, for Alabama’s parole board to grant posthumous pardons for the three remaining “Scottsboro Boys” who still had not had their convictions rescinded.

Seeking other professional opportunities, Leibowitz, a loyal Democratic Party member, accepted the nomination in 1940 for judge of the Kings County Court, a criminal court that always had more cases than it could process. He comfortably won the election and began a 14-year term. Though toying with the idea of running for mayor of New York City, he was reelected as a judge in 1954 for a second term. Then, following a restructuring of the courts in New York City in 1962, he was named a justice of the New York State Supreme Court, where he served until his retirement seven years later.

From the start of his deliberations, Judge Leibowitz was tough and unrelenting in his determination to ensure that the cause of justice was properly served—at least, as he interpreted it. “He used the same eloquence,” The Washington Post later noted, “with which he once had persuaded juries to return verdicts of ‘not guilty’ to berate prosecutors, defense attorneys, police officers, defendants, and, sometimes, other judges.” He had little sympathy for those found guilty of committing a crime, no matter their age or the circumstances. Punishment was meted out accordingly. Leibowitz had utilized a fair number of clever strategies as a defense lawyer, yet as a judge he roughly chided another defendant for refusing to answer his questions. “I’ll give you a thousand years, if necessary,” he warned the man.

He presided over more than 11,000 trials—of notorious gang members and organized crime assailants, ordinary men and women, as well as New York celebrities such as Leo “the Lip” Durocher, the famed and ornery baseball player and manager. In June 1945, Durocher, then the manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, was arrested at Ebbets Field along with John Moore, a special policeman, for assaulting a fan named John Christian who had heckled Durocher throughout the game. In the fight, Christian’s jaw was fractured. In a trial held before Leibowitz the following April, the jury acquitted both defendants in 38 minutes.

Durocher was lucky. Earning the nickname “Sentencing Sam,” Leibowitz dispensed harsh—but in his view, fair and just—punishment to convicted felons, including the death penalty, which he long maintained acted as a deterrent. So it was that in mid-February 1941, the lawyer who had saved more than 100 clients from the electric chair imposed his first death sentence on George Zeitz, a 25-year-old laborer from Brooklyn who had been convicted of murdering a loan shark named Irving Moskowitz following a dispute about an unpaid loan. During Leibowitz’s almost-30-year career on the bench, he sent 40 defendants to the death house at Sing Sing and other institutions.

Still, the compassion that Leibowitz had shown as an attorney remained part of his psyche. He was an early prison reformer, supporting conjugal visits for inmates. He also pushed for programs to rehabilitate juvenile delinquents. And, early in January 1944, he appointed the first African American—not only in the state of New York but in the entire country—to serve as foreman of a grand jury.

In the early 1950s, Leibowitz was again on the front pages of New York newspapers with his supervision of a grand jury that issued indictments against 18 New York City policemen who were accused of taking bribes from bookmaker Harry Gross. In the subsequent trial, Gross refused to testify and Leibowitz cited him for contempt 60 times and sentenced him to five years in prison and a $15,000 fine. Soon after, Leibowitz testified in Washington, D.C., and shared his knowledge of bookmaking and gambling with members of the U.S. Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce—or Kefauver Committee—chaired by Sen. Estes Kefauver (the committee was immortalized in the film Godfather II).

Leibowitz became testier as he became older. He was accused by lawyers and judges of having a bad temper in court. Yet, he did not want to retire at the mandatory retirement age of 70 in 1963. He got a reprieve from a board of his fellow judges who certified him as fit for continued service, despite the fact that the Association of the Bar of the City of New York opposed his redesignation to the bench. He remained a judge for another six years, until 1969. In an emotional ceremony in his courtroom on his last day, with his wife, Belle, and his children present, Leibowitz, fighting tears, said, “They spoke of me as a tough judge. Well, [my wife] can tell you how nights went by when I tossed in bed until dawn trying to figure out what to do with the poor devil to be sentenced in the morning.”

Nine years later, on Jan. 11, 1978, the legendary Samuel Leibowitz died in a Brooklyn hospital following a stroke. He was 84 years old.