Byron White
Byron Raymond White (June 8, 1917 - April 15, 2002) was best known 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.
In the 1930s, White played football for the University of Colorado, where he acquired the nickname "Whizzer", which he later came to despise. He was also a running back for the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Detroit Lions, while putting himself through Yale law school, where he graduated first in his class. He won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford (Hertford College), where he met President Kennedy, who had come to visit White's father, then U.S. ambassador to Britain.
During his service on the high court, he was typically a vocal conservative. He consistently opposed restrictions on the police, dissenting in the landmark 1966 case of Miranda v. Arizona. He also dissented in the 1973 case of Roe v. Wade, and continued to call for overturning that decision. White wrote the majority opinion in Bowers v. Hardwick (1986) which upheld Georgia's anti-sodomy law. In 1998 the Georgia state supreme court invalidated the law on state constitutional grounds, and the U.S. Supreme Court overruled the Bowers decision in Lawrence v. Texas (2003).
White took a middle course on the issue of the death penalty: he was one of five justices who voted in Furman v. Georgia to (temporarily) abolish capital punishment in the United States, but in 1976, he joined in the Court's decision in Gregg v. Georgia which approved the revised death penalty statutes enacted in reaction to Furman. 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 which invalidated the death penalty for rape of a 16-year old married woman.
White consistently supported the Court's post-Brown attempts to fully desegregate public schools, even through the controversial line of forced busing cases. He also often voted to uphold affirmative action remedies to racial inequality.
