Athletes - Byron White

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	Athletes - Byron White

Byron Raymond White (June 8, 1917 – April 15, 2002) won fame both as a speedy running back and as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Appointed to the court by John F. Kennedy in 1962, he served until his retirement in 1993.

He was born in Fort Collins, Colorado and died in Denver at the age of 84 from complications of pneumonia.

Education

In the mid-1930s, White attended the University of Colorado, where he was a star football player and earned a degree in 1938. He won a Rhodes Scholarship to the University of Oxford (Hertford College). After World War II, he attended Yale Law School, graduating first in his class in 1946.

Football

White was a star football player for the University of Colorado, where he acquired the nickname "Whizzer", which he later came to despise. After graduation he signed with the NFL's Pittsburgh Football Pirates, playing there during the 1938 season. He took 1939 off to study at Oxford, but returned to play for the Detroit Lions from 1940-41. In three NFL seasons, he played in 33 games. He lead the league in rushing yards in 1938 and 1940. His career was cut short when he entered the United States Navy during World War II; after the war, he elected to attend law school rather than returning to football. He was elected to the College Football Hall of Fame in 1954.

Military Service

During World War II, White served as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Navy stationed in the Pacific Theatre. He wrote the intelligence report on the sinking of future President John F. Kennedy's PT-109.

Law career

After serving as a law clerk to Chief Justice Frederick M. Vinson, White returned to Denver, where he practiced law for a number of years. During the 1960 presidential campaign, White put his football celebrity to use as chair of John F. Kennedy's campaign in Colorado. During the Kennedy administration, White served as Deputy Attorney General, the number two man in the Justice Department, under Robert F. Kennedy. Acquiring renown within the Kennedy Administration for his humble manner and sharp mind, he was appointed by Kennedy in 1962 to succeed Justice Charles Evans Whittaker, who had taken ill.

Supreme Court

During his service on the high court, White wrote 994 opinions. His votes and opinions on the bench reflect an ideology that has been notoriously difficult for popular journalists and legal scholars alike to pin down. White often took a narrow, fact-specific view of cases before the Court, and, in the tradition of the New Deal, frequently supported a broad view of governmental powers. He consistently voted against creating constitutional restrictions on the police, dissenting in the landmark 1966 case of Miranda v. Arizona.

Substantive due process doctrine

Frequently a critic of the doctrine of "substantive due process," White dissented in the controversial 1973 case of Roe v. Wade which declared abortion a constitutional right. But White voted to strike down a state ban on contraceptives in the 1965 case of Griswold v. Connecticut, although he did not join the majority opinion, which famously asserted a "right of privacy" on the basis of the "penumbras" of the Bill of Rights.

White and Rehnquist were the only dissenters from the Court's decision in Roe v. Wade, though White's dissent used stronger language, suggesting that Roe was "an exercise in raw judicial power" and criticizing the decision for "interposing a constitutional barrier to state efforts to protect human life." White, who usually adhered firmly to the doctrine of stare decisis remained a critic of Roe throughout his term on the bench.

However, White parted company with Rehnquist in strongly supporting the Supreme Court decisions striking down laws that discriminated on the basis of gender, agreeing with Justice William J. Brennan in 1973's Frontiero v. Richardson that laws discriminating on the basis of gender should be subject to strict scrutiny.

White wrote the majority opinion in Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), which upheld Georgia's anti-sodomy law against a substantive due process attack, that was later overruled by Lawrence v. Texas (2003).

Death penalty

White also took a middle course on the issue of the death penalty: he was one of five justices who voted in Furman v. Georgia (1972) to strike down several state capital punishment statutes, voicing concern over the arbitrariness with which the death penalty was administered. The Furman decision effectively ended capital punishment in the U.S. for the remainder of the 1970s. White, however, was not against the death penalty in all forms: he voted to uphold the death penalty statutes at issue in Gregg v. Georgia (1976), even the mandatory death penalty schemes struck down by the Court. White accepted the position that the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution required that all punishments be "proportional" to the crime; thus, he wrote the opinion in Coker v. Georgia (1977), which invalidated the death penalty for rape of a 16-year old married woman.

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