Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman on the U.S. Supreme Court, a rancher’s daughter who wielded great power over the law at the center of the court’s ideological spectrum, died on Friday in Phoenix, reports the New York Times. She was 93. The Supreme Court announced her death, saying the cause was complications of dementia. Very little could happen without O’Connor’s support when it came to the polarizing issues on the court’s docket. The law regarding affirmative action, abortion, voting rights, religion, federalism, sex discrimination and other hot-button subjects often was what Connor thought it should be. In a series of 5-to-4 rulings from the mid-1990s until the early 2000s, the court held that Congress had exceeded its authority in seeking to impose various obligations on state governments. In 1995, O’Connor gave the chief justice her vote in the first decision in 60 years to invalidate a federal law on the grounds that it exceeded the power of Congress to regulate interstate commerce.
The decision, United States v. Lopez, struck down a federal law that made it a crime to carry a gun near a school. The regulated activity was not commerce, Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote for the 5-to-4 majority, adding that it was up to the court to maintain the “distinction between what is truly national and what is truly local.” A1984 opinion O'Connor wrote early in her tenure, Strickland v. Washington, articulated the test that's now used by all courts to decide whether or not a defendant in a criminal case has received effective assistance of counsel as the Sixth Amendment guarantees. As summarized in the court opinion, it held that the appropriate standard for ineffective assistance of counsel requires both that the defense attorney was objectively deficient and that there was a reasonable probability that a competent attorney would have led to a different outcome. (The Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law at Arizona State University is a co-sponsor of this news digest.)
Comments