Gilbert Merritt, fixture of Tennessee judiciary for decades, dies at 86
“Throughout his career, Judge Merritt pushed our legal system to become more of what it purports to be, a true justice system.”
– STACY RECTOR, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF TENNESSEANS FOR ALTERNATIVES TO THE DEATH PENALTY
Gilbert Stroud Merritt Jr., a native Nashvillian who rose to become a towering figure in the city’s legal community over the past six decades and the longest-serving member of the current 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, died Monday. He was 86.
His daughter, Louise Clark Merritt, confirmed he died of metastatic prostate cancer.
Merritt was a fixture in the judiciary and Tennessee politics. He sat on the bench for 44 years, earning a reputation for evenhanded rulings and a thorough and independent drive to serve as a check on executive power.
“Judge Merritt was a cherished friend of my entire family,” former Vice President Al Gore said. “A deeply intelligent and deliberative legal thinker, he was an ardent defender of the liberties that form the foundations of our Constitution. … I am holding his family in my thoughts and prayers.”
He believed in duty to three causes, his son Eli Merritt said: to his family, to the Constitution and “to the pursuit of equal justice under the law for all Americans, regardless of race, religion, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation or incarceration status.”
His long career also included a stint as the U.S. attorney for Middle Tennessee from 1966-69 under President Lyndon B. Johnson.
President Jimmy Carter tapped him for the appellate court in 1977. In the 1990s, President Bill Clinton considered Merritt for a nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court but eventually selected Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
“A diligent practitioner and respected jurist, Judge Merritt will be remembered most of all as a shining example of the best the profession had to offer. He understood and valued the servant role of lawyering,” said U.S. Chief District Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw in a statement. “Judge Merritt lived a full life serving Tennessee and our nation. Without question, his passing is a great loss to the legal profession, but it is much better for having had him as an example to emulate.”
‘MERRITT CALLED IT AS HE SAW IT’
On the bench, Merritt usually joined his more liberal colleagues, although colleagues said he was respected on both sides of the political aisle.
He staunchly opposed the death penalty, publicly and privately denouncing what he called a “Middle Ages practice” and highlighting its disproportionate use against Black defendants.
“Judge Merritt called it as he saw it, even when doing so was not popular or advantageous for him personally. Throughout his career, Judge Merritt pushed our legal system to become more of what it purports to be, a true justice system,” said Stacy Rector, executive director of Tennesseans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.
During his three-year tenure as U.S. attorney in Middle Tennessee in the 1960s, Merritt appointed the first woman, Martha Craig Daughtrey, and first Black person, Carlton Petway, to serve as assistant U.S. attorneys for the Middle Tennessee district.
Daughtrey, who serves on the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, said that even though she graduated in the top of her class, Merritt was “the only person in town who was willing to hire me.”
Daughtrey later became the first woman in Tennessee history to take a seat on the bench of the Tennessee Supreme Court in 1990, when she was appointed by Gov. Ned McWherter. In 1993, she was appointed by Clinton to 6th the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, where she remains a senior judge.
“We just had a connection. I ended up with an office next to his in the customs house building,” she said. “We were friends for a long time.”
‘JUSTICE FOR ALL’
Perhaps the most wellknown of Merritt’s cases involved a ruling on due process violations in the case of a man accused of war crimes.
Merritt in 1993 pushed for the 6th Circuit to reopen the case of John Demjanjuk, an Ohio man now believed to have been wrongly accused of being a Nazi torturer known as “Ivan the Terrible” of the Treblinka concentration camp, according to news reports from the time.
He sat on a panel that revoked a 1986 extradition order to Israel on the grounds attorneys for the U.S. withheld information favorable to Demjanjuk in the initial extradition hearing.
“He believed in justice for all, even if that meant, as in the Demjanjuk case, sacrificing his own popularity and chances for elevation to the Supreme Court,” Eli Merritt said.