William Wayne Justice, Noted Judge, Dies at 89 Twitter Linkedin Sign In to E-Mail Print Reprints Share By DOUGLAS MARTIN Published: October 14, 2009 Judge William Wayne Justice of Federal District Court, who ruled on ground-breaking class-action suits that compelled Texas to integrate schools, reform prisons, educate illegal immigrants and revamp many other policies, died Tuesday in Austin. He was 89. Associated Press via, The Tyler Morning Telegraph Judge William Wayne Justice Luz Probus, his judicial assistant, confirmed the death. Until shortly before his death, Judge Justice had presided over cases in Austin, having taken senior status there in 1998. Judge Justice was a small-town lawyer active in Democratic Party politics when President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed him to the federal bench of the Eastern District of Texas in 1968. Sitting in Tyler, Tex., he made rulings over three decades in a series of major cases that caused him to be called the most powerful man in Texas by those who agreed with his largely liberal decisions and the most hated by those who differed. In a 1998 column in The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Molly Ivins made what she called the “painfully obvious point” that Judge Justice lived up to his name, saying he “brought the United States Constitution to Texas.” The same year, Lino Graglia, a constitutional law professor at the University of Texas at Austin said in an interview with The Dallas Morning News, “He has wreaked more havoc and misery and injury to the people of Texas than any man in the last 25 years.” If Judge Justice seemed high-handed, it was partly because he believed that the founding fathers wanted judges to seize and command the higher ground. Perhaps not surprisingly, people reacted with hate mail, death threats, ostracism and bumper stickers demanding his impeachment. “The plain fact of the matter is that the majority is sometimes wrong,” Judge Justice declared in an interview with The New York Times in 1982. Frank R. Kemerer, who wrote “William Wayne Justice: A Judicial Biography” (1991), said in an interview on Wednesday, “He had a transcendent value, which was to advance human dignity and provide a measure of basic fairness.” In many cases Judge Justice challenged official intransigence by applying the known law of the land, as he did in 1971 when he told school districts in East Texas to obey the law by integrating. Even 17 years after the United States Supreme Court ordered schools to be integrated, it was not unusual for students in all-black schools to have outhouses rather than indoor restrooms. Other cases lacked precedent. In 1978, Judge Justice struck down a Texas law that let public school districts charge tuition for the children of illegal immigrants. When the ruling was upheld 5 to 4 by the Supreme Court in 1982, millions of children had the right to a free education. “There was absolutely no case law on it,” Judge Justice said in an interview with The Star-Telegram in 1998. “I found no case, no statute that covered the point of law that I had to decide. So I guess I made my own little contribution.” To many, the judge defined the concept of activist judge. In the early 1970s, he had his law clerks — many of them from top law schools like Harvard and Stanford — sift through hundreds of inmate letters complaining of cruel and unusual punishment in Texas prisons. He pulled out eight and consolidated them into a single action, then appointed a lawyer from the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, William Bennett Turner, to handle the case. He asked the federal Justice Department to join with the inmates as a friend of the court. The state defended a prison system with two doctors for every 17,000 prisoners, where 2,000 inmates slept on the floor and where inmate trustees, known as building tenders, essentially ran the cell blocks through coercion. It contended that Texas in fact had the best penal system in the nation. In 1980, after a trial that lasted nearly a year, Judge Justice ordered major changes in the state’s prison system. In 1987, he held the state in contempt because the promised progress had been so meager. In 2002, after Texas had spent hundreds of millions of dollars to build and improve prisons, Judge Justice released the Texas penal system from federal oversight. Lawyers interested in assembling class-action suits sought out Judge Justice’s court. In 1973, he made a far-reaching decision to require Texas to repair “truly shocking conditions” in its juvenile detention system. Other important rulings included enforcing laws on integrating public housing and enforcing laws on bilingual education. William Wayne Justice was born in Athens, Tex., on Feb. 25, 1920. When he was 7, his father, Will, a flamboyant lawyer, him a partner, even changing the nameplate above his office door to “W. D. Justice and Son.” Judge Justice had a series of illnesses as a child, including chronic whooping cough. He later suggested that the experience might have made him more compassionate toward the unfortunate. He was also moved by the hungry, jobless men he saw hanging from boxcars during the Depression, he said in an interview with The Washington Post in 1987. He graduated from the University of Texas and its law school, served in the Army for four years in Asia during World War II and then went into private law practice with his father. His father was a good friend of Ralph Yarborough, who became a United States senator from Texas. Mr. Yarborough persuaded President John F. Kennedy to appoint Judge Justice a United States attorney in 1962, then did the same with President Johnson to help him become a federal judge. “I had a pretty good idea what I was getting into,” Judge Justice said in an interview with Texas Monthly in 2006. It is unclear whether his expectations included his wife’s being refused service by beauticians and carpenters refusing to work on his house in Tyler once they realized who owned it. Judge Justice is survived by his wife, the former Sue Rowan; his daughter, Ellen Justice; and a granddaughter. After threats arising from the epic school desegregation battle at the beginning of his career, Judge Justice did not ask for armed guards. Instead, he took up tae kwon do, the Korean martial art that resembles karate. “It was a great way to take out my frustrations,” he told The Times. “You build up a lot of hostilities sitting on the bench all day.”
Posted on: Sat, 22 Feb 2014 21:58:51 +0000
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