WASHINGTON, April 15 (UPI) -- Retired Justice Byron R. White died Monday in Denver from complications of pneumonia, the Supreme Court said.
He was 84.
Appointed to the court in 1962 by his friend, President John F. Kennedy, White served 31 years on the court before stepping down in 1993.
Since then, he has sat occasionally as an appellate judge in Denver, and served as chairman of the Commission on Structural Alternatives for the Federal Courts of Appeals.
White wore many hats during his long life. He was a professional football player, Rhodes scholar, Navy intelligence officer and lawyer.
He hated the nickname "Whizzer," a product of his college football career, and never used it himself.
The justice might have been commissioner of football instead of a member of the high tribunal had it not been for World War II and wartime intimacy with Kennedy.
The war ended White's outstanding career as a professional halfback. Years later, Kennedy ended White's Denver law practice by calling him to the Justice Department and, one year later, naming him to the Supreme Court.
White succeeded Charles K. Whittaker in April 1962, and showed quickly that he was not always going to be the type of "activist" jurist that court observers had expected him to be.
White's first dissent was from a ruling that defined drug addiction as an illness rather than a crime. He said: "I deem this application of 'cruel and unusual punishment' so novel that I suspect the court was hard put to find a way to ascribe to the framers of the Constitution the result reached today rather than its own notions of ordered liberty."
White disappointed liberals who admired the social activism of such justices as William O. Douglas.
White steadily refused throughout his years on the bench to stretch state and federal laws to fit passing social needs. He applied the law as he felt it was, rather than how he thought it should be.
He precisely expressed his views on judicial power when he dissented from the historic 1973 decision legalizing abortions during the first six months of pregnancy.
"The court apparently values the convenience of the pregnant mother more than the continued existence and development of the life or potential life that she carries," he wrote. "Whether or not I might agree with that marshalling of values, I can in no event join in the court's judgment because I find no constitutional warrant for imposing such an order of priorities on the people and legislatures of the states."
White reaffirmed his opposition to abortion in 1983 and again in 1986 when he dissented from rulings striking down state and local government restrictions on abortion.
In 1992's Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, White joined the dissent of Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who said then that the time was "ripe" for a reassessment of Roe vs. Wade.
White's approach to the law reflected the self-discipline and Spartan virtues he developed in eastern Colorado, where he was born June 8, 1917.
His father, Alpha Albert White, was branch manager of a lumber supply company in the town of Wellington. Byron and his older brother Sam had to pick sugar beets in the local fields to earn spending money.
White reminisced to an interviewer in 1962: "We might make a dollar a day or maybe even two. When we got a little older, we might even work for ourselves. You bought your own clothes or whatever you needed with what you earned."
White played football, put the shot, threw the discus and jumped the hurdles. He graduated first in his high school class, and won a scholarship that Colorado gave to the valedictorian in every public high school in the state.
The future judge made Phi Beta Kappa in his junior year at the University of Colorado. He drew national attention as the university's tailback and received the nickname "Whizzer," which in later years he hated.
He led his team to an undefeated season during his senior year in 1938, losing the Cotton Bowl to Rice. The future would be clear to most youths in his spot: a football career as player, perhaps coach and possibly team owner or commissioner.
But his academic attainments led him to balk at concentrating all his energies on sports. He accepted the offer of a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford, but put off going to England until January 1939 so he could play football with the Pittsburgh Steelers at the then unheard of salary of $15,000 for a single season.
He led the National Football League in rushing with 567 yards. No other rookie had ever led the league in any department, and White did it with a last-place team.
White left Oxford in the fall of 1939 when war erupted in Europe. He attended Yale Law School, but played the 1940 football season with the Detroit Lions to earn more money.
He enlisted in the Navy after Pearl Harbor, and never was paid for playing football again.
White served almost four years in the South Pacific as a lieutenant in intelligence. There he renewed his acquaintance with a fellow lieutenant, John F. Kennedy, who was piloting a PT boat.
They had met briefly in 1939 at a reception for Rhodes scholars that Kennedy's father, Joseph, hosted as ambassador to Britain. The pair became close friends -- some histories maintain that they chased women together -- but parted after the war.
White graduated from law school magna cum laude five months after war ended, and then clerked for a year for the chief justice of the United States, Fred Vinson. He was the first Supreme Court clerk ever to reach the Supreme Court itself.
He met socially during this period with Kennedy, who was a freshman congressman. Many tempting offers came to him in Washington after his year of clerkship ended, but he decided to return to Colorado to practice law.
Kennedy was a senator when the two next met following a speech the future president made at the University of Denver.
Their friendship endured despite their rare encounters, and in 1960 White headed a Citizens for Kennedy group.
After the election, the new attorney general, Robert Kennedy, asked that White be named his deputy. Several months after White took over this job, the president named him to the Supreme Court.
He did not fill the role on the court that Kennedy had envisaged.
His performance contrasted sharply with the consistently liberal decisions of the president's other court appointee, Arthur Goldberg. Students of the court came to rank him with the essentially conservative justices.
White's main conservative bent was in the area of criminal rights. He stated his position early in his court career in a blistering dissent from Miranda vs. Arizona in 1966, which set forth the rules for advising defendants of their rights.
He said: "In some unknown number of cases, the court's rule will return a killer, a rapist or other criminal to the streets and to the environment which produced him, to repeat his crime whenever it pleases him. As a consequence, there will not be a gain, but a loss in human dignity."
White's views in this field attracted majority support following President Richard Nixon's appointment of four new justices. Although the Miranda decision was not overturned, the new judges widened the scope of warrantless searches by police and the right of prosecutors to introduce to a grand jury evidence that had been obtained illegally.
During the 1985 term, White, writing for a 6-3 majority, said the Constitution permits public school teachers and official to search students without a warrant if there are "reasonable grounds" for believing the search will yield evidence of a violation.
However, that same year White wrote an opinion that said police officers may not shoot to kill to stop an unarmed and non-dangerous suspect.
Probably his most controversial decision came during the 1985-86 term, when White led a 5-4 majority in ruling that the Constitution does not include a fundamental right to engage in sodomy.
A homosexual rights group said the decision would go down in history as the Dred Scott case of the gay rights movement, a reference to the 1857 high court ruling that blacks were not citizens.
White, however, drew high marks from liberals for his opposition to racial and sexual discrimination, and his support of the reapportionment of voting districts.
In 1986, he authored a landmark decision in an Indiana case that held that glaring forms of gerrymandering may be unconstitutional. The following year, he wrote for a unanimous court that ethnic groups, regardless of race, are protected by federal civil rights laws.
He was a determined anti-communist, dissenting repeatedly from decisions of the Warren court that struck down loyalty oaths on state and federal levels.
The justice opposed a 1974 decision that said private citizens could not win libel suits merely by showing that a news story was actually wrong. The ruling said that the plaintiff had to prove that an editor or reporter was negligent in using the item.
White was once punched by a man who said a Supreme Court ruling on pornography was too permissive. The justice was at a Utah State Bar conference in Salt Lake City in 1982 when the man punched him, saying he wanted to protest the court's rulings extending First Amendment protection to sexually explicit materials and in favor of school busing for racial integration.
White suffered only minor injuries.
The assailant, Newton Estes of Kaysville, Utah, was convicted of assault and sentenced to 10 days in jail.
Six years later, in June 1988, the 63-year-old Estes pleaded guilty to a felony count of attempted aggravated sexual abuse of an 11-year-old girl and of distributing harmful materials to a minor.
As a Supreme Court justice, White was served by 100 clerks during his 31-year tenure.
He is survived by his wife Marion; a son, Charles Byron White; a daughter, Nancy White Lippe, and six grandchildren.
The Supreme Court said the details of funeral arrangements would be released as soon as possible.
