Retired Supreme Court justice dies at 99
WASHINGTON — John Paul Stevens, the bow-tied and independent-thinking Republican nominated justice who unexpected ly emerged as the Supreme Court’s leading liberal, died Tuesday in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., after suffering a stroke Monday. He was 99.
During nearly 35 years on the court, Mr. Stevens stood for the freedom and dignity of individuals, be they students or immigrants or prisoners. He acted to limit the death penalty, squelch official prayer in schools, establish gay rights, promote racial equality and preserve legal abortion. He protected the rights of crime suspects and illegal immigrants facing deportation.
He influenced fellow justices to give foreign terrorism suspects held for years at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, naval base the right to plead for their release in U. S. courts.
Mr. Stevens served more than twice the average tenure for a justice, and was only the second to mark his 90th birthday on the high court. From his appointment by President Gerald Ford in 1975 through his retirement in June 2010, he shaped decisions that touched countless aspects of American life.
“He brought to our bench an inimitable blend of kindness, humility, wisdom and independence. His unrelenting commitment to justice has left us a better nation,” Chief Justice John Roberts said in a statement.
He remained an active writer and speaker into his late 90s, surprising some when he came out against now- Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation following the judge’s angry denial of sexual assault allegations. Mr. Stevens wrote an autobiography, “The Making of a Justice: My First 94 Years,” that was released just after his 99th birthday in April 2019.
Duquesne University president Ken Gormley interviewed the former justice while he was working on his book “The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr.”
By the time Mr. Gormley was writing the book, Mr. Stevens had a reputation as a liberal justice. But Mr. Stevens had written the opinion in Clinton v. Jones, which determined that a sitting president does not have immunity from civil litigation.
“Oftentimes when you try to interview Supreme Court justices they say very little, they often don’t want to talk on the record,” Mr. Gormley said. “And he sat there at his desk and looked at me and he said ‘ I wouldn’t have changed a single word.’ He felt very strongly.
“He revered the law. He didn’t care if it was Democrat or Republican,” Mr. Gormley continued. “He felt [ in Clinton v. Jones that] the Constitution Constitution didn’t provide a protection. He didn’t care whether it was a Democratic president. He just cared that they followed the law and he felt he had to testify.”
Though Mr. Stevens was appointed by a Republican president and at first was considered a centrist, he came to be seen as a lion of liberalism on the court. But he rejected that characterization and always considered himself to be a conservative.
“I don’t think of myself as a liberal at all,” Mr. Stevens told The New York Times in 2007. “I think as part of my general politics, I’m pretty darn conservative.”
The way Mr. Stevens saw it, he held to the same ground, but the court had shifted steadily to the right over the decades, creating the illusion that he was moving leftward.
Indeed, Mr. Gormley said he believes that contradiction occurred because of the world changing around Mr. Stevens rather than the justice adjusting his own values.
“He always stuck to his guns. He did the right thing even when it wasn’t necessarily what one party or another would want, like with the case involving President Clinton, and he never looked back,” Mr. Gormley said.
“And I think that his legacy is really that he has represented a kind of vanishing era in American government – not just in the courts, but government generally – where decency, integrity and pushing aside politics in favor of what is the correct course of action as a public servant was really foremost for him in everything he did.”
Mr. Stevens did change his views on some issues, however. He morphed from a critic of affirmative action to a supporter, and came to believe the death penalty was wrong.
His legal reasoning was often described as unpredictable or idiosyncratic, especially in his early years on the court. He was a prolific writer of separate opinions laying out his own thinking, whether he agreed or disagreed with the majority’s ruling. Yet Mr. Stevens didn’t consider his methods novel. He tended toward a casebycase approach, avoided sweeping judicial philosophies, and stayed mindful of precedent.
The white- haired Mr. Stevens, eyes often twinkling behind owlish glasses, was the picture of old- fashioned geniality on the court and off. He took an unusually courteous tone with lawyers arguing their cases, but he was no pushover. After his fellow justices fired off questions, Mr. Stevens would politely weigh in. “May I ask a question?” he’d ask gently, then quickly slice to the weakest point of a lawyer’s argument.
Mr. Stevens was especially concerned with the plight of ordinary citizens up against the government or other powerful interests.
More often, however, Mr. Stevens credited his sensitivity to abuses of power by police and prosecutors to what he learned while representing criminal defendants in pro bono cases as a young Chicago lawyer.
He voiced only one regret about his Supreme Court career: that he had supported reinstating the death penalty in 1976. More than three decades later, Mr. Stevens publicly declared his opposition to capital punishment, saying that years of bad court decisions had overlooked racial bias, favored prosecutors and otherwise undermined his expectation that death sentences could be handed down fairly.
The retirement of Mr. Stevens, known as a defender of strict separation of church and state, notably left the high court without a single Protestant member for the first time.
“I guess I’m the last WASP,” he joked, saying the issue was irrelevant to the justices’ work. Justice Neil Gorsuch, who joined the court in 2017, was raised Catholic but attends a Protestant church.
Born in 1920, Mr. Stevens was a privileged child of a bygone era: He met Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh at the family hotel and was at the ballpark when Babe Ruth hit his famous “called- shot” home run in the 1932 World Series.
He joined the Navy the day before the attack on Pearl Harbor, and was awarded the Bronze Star for his service with a Japanese code- breaking team.
After World War II, Mr. Stevens graduated first in his class at Northwestern University’s law school.