John T. Racanelli, proenvironment justice, dies at 91
John T. Racanelli, a retired California justice whose pioneering opinions had a profound impact on disability rights and the environment, died Thursday at his home in Manhattan. He was 91.
His wife, journalist Betty Medsger, confirmed the death and said he had congestive heart failure and recurrent aspiration pneumonia.
Racanelli was a trial judge in Santa Clara County Superior Court for 13 years, starting in 1964 when he was appointed by Gov. Pat Brown. He became what he liked to call a “double brownie,” Medsger said, when Pat Brown’s son, Gov. Jerry Brown, then appointed him in 1977 to the state appellate court. He served for 14 years before retiring in 1991.
After retiring, he joined the board of directors of a leading Bay Area conservation group, the Bay Institute.
His most groundbreaking ruling, eponymously known as the Racanelli decision, came in 1986, which established for the first time that the government must protect not just the water rights of farmers and municipalities but also the needs of fish and wildlife.
“It remains an important decision,” said Harrison Dunning, a leading expert on natural resources law and water law who taught at UC Davis. “He was a very eloquent spokesman for environmental values.”
Racanelli also authored a key decision on disability rights, the Becker case, which held that a man with Down syndrome had a right to a lifesaving surgery his parents who’d abandoned him didn’t want to pay for. The ruling strengthened social and legal policies that favored the best interests of the child.
Recently, he was one of nine high-ranking retired state judges who wrote a key letter advising President Barack Obama on opening diplomatic ties with Cuba.
Racanelli started out as a lawyer in San Francisco, but soon established a thriving practice in Sunnyvale and an active role in the Democratic Party before taking the bench.
His son, John C. Racanelli, said his father was always committed to social justice — perhaps in part because he experienced discrimination firsthand “to a smaller degree” as the son of Italian immigrants on the East Coast in the 1920s and ’30s.
Well before the current wave of criminal justice reform in California, he received an award in 1974 for “equitable administration of justice to the poor and indigent” from Santa Clara Community Legal Services.
He also served on the board of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, a nonprofit social research group whose mission includes creating rehabilitative justice systems for youth and adults, and addressing the needs of older adults and adults with disabilities.
John C. Racanelli said his father was beloved and admired by his children, including his two daughters and two other sons. But he was clearly a man of the law.
“Dad fingerprinted me when I was 6,” he said, recalling how his father dipped all the kids’ fingers in talcum powder to show them how their presence could be detected on surfaces like a backdoor latch they weren’t supposed to touch, even if they denied being in the vicinity.
After the justice and his wife moved to the Flatiron district of Manhattan, he served on the board of the Committee for Modern Courts, which lobbies for legislation to improve the administration of justice in New York, including in immigration and family courts.
In addition to Medsger, he is survived by his five children: Christopher of Vermont, John of Baltimore, Karen of Oakland, Laurie of Texas and Tom of San Diego. He is also survived by six grandchildren, his first wife and mother of his children, and two brothers.