[Deathwatch] Byron White, Supreme Court Justice, 84

[Deathwatch Central]

Ex-Justice Byron White Dies at 84 
Mon Apr 15,11:50 PM ET 
By ANNE GEARAN, Associated Press Writer 

WASHINGTON (AP) - Retired Supreme Court Justice Byron R. White,
appointed by Democratic President Kennedy but remembered as a
law-and-order conservative who opposed much of the court's liberal
1960s agenda, died Monday at 84.

A football star as a young man, White served 31 years on the court
before retiring in 1993. In the court's history, only eight justices
served longer.

White died Monday morning in Denver, of complications from pneumonia,
the court announced. He was the last living former justice.

"He led a storybook life," said John Goldberg, a Vanderbilt law
professor who clerked for White from 1992-93, his final year on the
court. "I don't think there's a comparable biography anywhere else in
modern American history for someone who's done so many important things
so well."

White's story does evoke a movie script, a narrative of a uniquely
American 20th-century life.

He grew up in a tiny Colorado town, graduated first in his class and
was an All-American football player at the University of Colorado, then
went to England as a Rhodes scholar. He received high honors at Yale
law school, served in World War II and was known to a generation of
sports fans as "Whizzer" White, once the best-paid player in the
National Football League. White bristled at the nickname.

Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist recalled White as a fine colleague
and friend.

"He came as close as anyone I have known to meriting Matthew Arnold's
description of Sophocles: `He saw life steadily and saw it whole,'"
Rehnquist said Monday.

Justice Antonin Scalia (news - web sites) described White's
bone-crushing handshake as a metaphor for a forceful personality.

"If there is one adjective that never could, never would, be applied to
Byron White, it is wishy-washy," Scalia said. "You always knew where he
stood, that he was not likely to be moved, and hoped that he was lining
up on your side of scrimmage."

President Bush (news - web sites) recalled White as "a distinguished
jurist who served his country with honor and dedication."

In making Byron Raymond White his first Supreme Court pick in 1962,
Kennedy said White had "excelled in everything he had attempted."

White soon marked his independence from Kennedy's brand of liberalism,
supporting civil rights laws but dissenting as the court moved to
expand other rights and protections that White sometimes found
troubling.

He voted to give federal courts broad powers to order racial
desegregation of the nation's public schools, but he later opposed
broad use of affirmative action to remedy past discrimination in
employment.

White dissented from the court's 1966 Miranda v. Arizona ruling that
requires police to recite constitutional rights to those they arrest
and again in the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade (news - web sites) ruling
that legalized abortion nationwide.

Although his own views changed little, change around him on the court
made White a consistent, if independent, member of an increasingly
conservative majority. A hard-liner on law-and-order, White often spoke
for the court in decisions enhancing police authority.

White wrote for the court when, in 1984, it carved out for the first
time a "good faith" exception to the long-standing rule that excluded
from criminal trials any evidence unlawfully seized by police. White
said objects seized through police officers' use of a defective search
warrant could be used as trial evidence.

He generally opposed expansive freedom-of-expression rights and favored
greater governmental accommodation of religion in ways more liberal
justices considered violations of the constitutionally required
separation of church and state.

White also wrote for the court when it struck down capital punishment
for rapists, declared nude dancing a constitutionally protected form of
expression, exempted child pornography from free-speech protections and
stripped presidential Cabinet members of the absolute immunity from
civil lawsuits they once enjoyed.

"Although the received wisdom is never going to be that Justice White
was one of the giants of the federal judiciary, in fact he was a model
judge in many ways," said Cardozo School of Law professor and former
White law clerk Michael Herz. "He understood the consequences of what
the court did, and he did not reach further than he should have."

On the bench, the gravelly voiced White was a tough interrogator who
could leave lawyers stammering.

Off the bench, he had a brusque manner that many found off-putting.
Former law clerks and others who knew him, however, recall a warmer
presence in private and a talent for whimsy that included riding a
unicycle indoors.

"He didn't go out to charm people. He just acted natural, and most
everybody loved that," said Bob Harry, 83, a retired lawyer in Denver
and a longtime White friend.

White was 44, Kennedy's age, when the young president put him on the
court. The two had met in 1939, and their paths crossed again during
World War II when White, a naval intelligence officer, wrote the
official report of the sinking of Kennedy's PT-109.

Active in Kennedy's later presidential campaign, Attorney General
Robert Kennedy named White his deputy in charge of day-to-day
operations at the Justice Department (news - web sites). His court
nomination came a year later.

White told a Colorado audience in 2000 that he told Kennedy he didn't
much want to be a judge.

"I said to the president I would give it a try," White said.

He had been ill much of the last two years and looked frail during his
rare appearances at the Supreme Court. White had kept a court office
since his retirement, but closed it last year and moved back to
Colorado, a signal to many that his health was perilous.