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John Paul Stevens spent more than a third of his close century on Earth at the Supreme Court, where he was often on a different page than most of his fellow judges.
"It happens so often that you have to get used to losing," said Stevens, 99, in an interview. this Last week, in his condominium, close to the Atlantic Ocean. "My batting average was probably pretty low."
But a special loss persists and, reminds Stevens, brings grim recalls almost every week: the court's decision in 2008 District of Columbia c. Heller, who concluded that the second amendment protected a right to own a firearm unrelated to possible military service.
"Undoubtedly, the most blatantly incorrect decision the Court announced during my tenure as a judge," writes Stevens in his new memoir, "The Making of a Justice."
Heller and the second amendment, Stevens said in the interview, produces "such disastrous practical effects. I think we do not need all the weapons we have in the country, and if I could get rid of one thing, it was the elimination of the whole climate that characterized firearms. "
He continued, "The other day, another school was shooting in Colorado, and every time that happens, it seems to me that we do not need that kind of thing in this country and we should do everything what we can to try. to change it. "
Stevens poses for an official portrait of the Supreme Court in 2003. (John McDonnell / The Washington Post)
Stevens writes about his efforts to try to make the 5-on-4 decision a step in the opposite direction.
[[[[One student died and eight others injured in a shootout at a Denver suburban school.]
His 531-page book, to be published Tuesday, describes the life and career of a codebreaker belonging to a strongly Republican family of navy during the Second World War, proposed to the federal judiciary by a GOP President ( Richard M. Nixon). Supreme Court by another (Gerald R. Ford) who retired in 2010 as the most declared Liberal. Although Stevens thinks the court has changed more than him.
During the interview, he expressed widespread distress at the state of the world and the politics of the nation. "You get up in the morning and wonder what happened," he said. Nevertheless, he retains the reluctance of a judge even years after leaving the seat: "But I should not say more."
He wonders why it is so difficult for his former colleagues to recognize that partisan gerrymandering is a violation of the Constitution, just as racial gerrymandering is. "It's the same problem," he said. "Public officials, including state legislators, have a duty to act impartially. The whole point [of partisan gerrymandering] is to create an unfair result. "
Stevens, accompanied by Senator Charles Percy (left) and Attorney General Edward Levi, appeared at the December 1975 confirmation hearing (Douglas Chevalier / The Washington Post).
And he expressed his surprise to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., whom he respects and admires. "I must admit that he's more conservative than I thought," Stevens said. "But that does not go to his chief justice."
[[[[Brett M. Kavanaugh, the new player as the Supreme Court returns to partisan gerrymandering]
During the interview, Stevens was preparing for the meeting of his employees. More than 90 out of 125 people were expected to attend. He must stabilize with a walker, but he remains active. Tennis has been replaced by ping-pong, he said, but he still plays nine-hole golf every week.
"I do not go to the ocean as much as I used to, and it's really my favorite activity here," he said. "A strong guy" to help him in and out of surfing is now "an absolute necessity," he said.
It is hard to imagine that in his confirmation hearing of 1975, shortly after he became one of the first to undergo heart bypass surgery, the main obstacle was whether I had a enough life expectancy for justice to be given to the important appointment, he wrote. It was approved unanimously.
This memoir tells the story of a privileged childhood in Chicago, the ravages of the Great Depression and a family scandal, service rendered as a war cryptologist and charming legal career as a clerk of the Supreme Court, judge at the Court of Appeal and third longer justice. in the history of the court.
Stevens was in the stands at Wrigley Field in Chicago when Babe Ruth called his 1932 World Series hit – "my greatest claim to fame," he writes – and in the audience at the Democratic National Convention this summer when Franklin D. Roosevelt explained the New Deal about to become president. His father, Ernest, who brought Stevens to the speech, was a Warren Harding Republican.
Amelia Earhart told him that he had come out too late for a school party when she attended the opening of the Stevens Hotel in Chicago, the largest in the world at the time. Charles Lindbergh passed a caged dove that someone had given him. During a trip to the South, Stevens and his family attended "Gone With The Wind," the opening week in Atlanta.
Invitations to a Supreme Court Judge provide further information on celebrities. He was as enamored as others when he met Princess Diana, and a meeting with composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein provides a surprisingly stupid anecdote of Stevens, who often prepped his questions on the bench with courtesy. : "Let me ask. . .? "
It was during a dinner at the French Embassy in Washington that Stevens and his wife Maryan were sitting with Bernstein, who had just conducted the National Orchestra of France at the Kennedy Center. Maryan is questioned about the emotions that accompany the realization of a masterpiece.
"It's like [making love] in a cathedral, "replied Bernstein, according to Stevens in the memoir. Justice has conscientiously used the word f to authenticate his statements.
"The Making of a Justice" is Stevens' third book since leaving court; others tell the chief justices with whom he served and how he would have the Constitution redone. He said that he did not know if there was a lesson to be learned for the readers. "I did not have a specific mission in mind, I just started writing," he said.
A lesson from his childhood that enlightened his career, however, involved his father. The depression hit after the opening of the Stevens hotel and the place weakened. The hotel borrowed money from an insurance company controlled by Stevens' grandfather, an act considered by a Cook County attorney as embezzlement. Ernest Stevens was convicted, but his conviction was overturned by the Illinois Supreme Court, which found that it was not a "flicker" of evidence of Criminal intent.
"The first-hand knowledge of the fallibility of criminal justice" has made Stevens skeptical for the rest of his career, he said. "The system is not perfect – it's pretty good, but it's not perfect."
Stevens was one of the majorities who gave significant victories to homosexuals, limited the death penalty and kept the right to abortion.
[Shouting match breaks out as Alabama Senate delays vote on nation’s strictest abortion bill]
On this last point, he is puzzled by "more and more state legislatures" adopting restrictive laws in the hope of getting the Supreme Court to reconsider its decisions.
"I thought it was a problem that had been solved," he said. "I have no idea what the current court is going to do."
In the book, he detailed his efforts to derail the Heller majority. He adopted the original approach of Judge Antonin Scalia to show, in his view, that the historical texts supported the view that the Second Amendment was intended to prevent the federal disarmament of state militias, rather than to prohibit the control efforts of the United States. fire arms.
He wrote that he circulated his dissent five weeks before Scalia's majority opinion, hoping to persuade Judge Anthony M. Kennedy and, somewhat surprisingly, Judge Clarence Thomas.
"I think he's an intellectually honest person, and I thought there was a chance to persuade him," Stevens said about the historical arguments. "I guess I was dreaming a bit."
But Stevens said the efforts were successful in convincing Kennedy to insist that Scalia include restrictive language used by states and cities to defend their gun control measures.
Stevens is referring to United States of America v. Nixon, in which the court said the president was to hand over the White House records to congressional investigators, "like the organ point of the independence of justice".
He wrote the unanimous court decision in Clinton v. Jones, stating that a current president does not enjoy immunity from all civil suits for acts committed when he was not in office.
Both decisions were unanimous and "easy to take," Stevens said, but he refused to get caught up in the current battle between congressional investigators and President Trump.
He is asked: nothing to say about the president? "Nothing you already know," he said.
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