Leonidas "Leon" Jaworski (September 19, 1905 – December 9, 1982) was an American attorney and law professor who served as the second special prosecutor during the Watergate scandal.
[3] During World War II, Jaworski served in the United States Army's judge advocate general's office, reaching the rank of colonel.
Thereafter, Jaworski prosecuted forty-three African-American soldiers, of whom twenty-eight were convicted, in what was the longest U.S. Army court-martial of World War II.
However, Jaworski declined to participate in the Nuremberg Trials on the grounds that the prosecution there was based on laws that did not exist at the time of the culpable acts.
This discovery caused Cox to subpoena tapes of several presidential conversations as evidence for the upcoming criminal trial, but Nixon refused to release them, citing executive privilege.
On July 24, 1974, the Supreme Court ruled that the Special Prosecutor did have the right to sue the President; and that the "generalized assertion of [executive] privilege must yield to the demonstrated, specific need for evidence in a pending criminal trial".
In the summer of 1982, seven members of the grand jury choose to break their oath of silence because "they [were] convinced justice was not done" and discussed their 30-month service with the ABC news show 20/20.
In discussions with the grand jury, Jaworski cited "the trauma of the country", and prior to Nixon's resignation, the lack of precedent for indicting a sitting president.
Jaworski was a close friend of Dean Ernest Raba of St. Mary's University School of Law in San Antonio, where he taught as an adjunct professor for several years.
In 1977, Jaworski reluctantly agreed to serve as special counsel to a House Ethics Committee investigation to determine whether members had indirectly or directly accepted anything of value from the government of the Republic of Korea.
State and national bar associations reward professional achievement; the granting of the Jaworski Award is based solely on service to the greater Houston community.