My Mom's uncle has died. Below is his obit from The Providence Journal.


Retired Judge Raymond J. Pettine leaves legacy of landmark cases The federal jurist struck down state laws restricting abortion rights, ordered a sweeping overhaul of the state's prison system, and ruled that municipalities may not erect Christmas Nativity scenes on public land.

01:00 AM EST on Tuesday, November 18, 2003

BY GERALD M. CARBONE and SCOTT MacKAY
Journal Staff Writers

PROVIDENCE -- Retired federal Judge Raymond J. Pettine, whose cleric-like devotion to justice and learned legal decisions earned him nationwide respect from judges, lawyers and constitutional scholars, died yesterday at a hospital in Dallas. He was 91.

In 30 years as a U.S. District judge, Pettine cleaned up Rhode Island's prison system, protected abortion rights, and battled, at great personal cost, to preserve the constitutionally guaranteed separation of church and state.

An old-fashioned liberal, Pettine interpreted the Constitution in ways that, he said in a 1993 interview, "give meaning to the heart and soul of what it's all about: a kinder, more understanding Constitution that recognizes the disenfranchised, the poor and underprivileged."

Pettine was the U.S. District Court's chief judge from 1971 to 1982, a tumultuous time during which he issued dozens of landmark opinions: upholding freedom of speech, of religion, of the press; rights of privacy; equal protection; due process, and other Bill of Rights guarantees.

"He had a passion for doing what was right and for justice," said U.S. Appeals Court Judge Bruce M. Selya.

Pettine struck down state laws restricting abortion rights, ordered and oversaw a 15-year overhaul of the state's prison system, and ruled that municipalities may not erect Christmas Nativity scenes on public land. (The U.S. Supreme Court overruled Pettine's Nativity decision.)

Sometimes his decisions were landmarks because they extended old freedoms into new areas, as when he ruled that prisoners have the right to uncensored mail (in Palmigiano v. Travisono, 1970). Sometimes they were on the cutting edge of social change, as when he ruled in 1980 that a gay student could bring a male date to his high-school prom (Fricke v. Lynch). And sometimes Pettine created landmarks simply by virtue of the clarity, thoughtfulness and scope of his written opinions.

In 1974, while striking down a law that made it illegal for some taverns to sell drinks to women, Pettine wrote: "With all due respect to Victorian ideas of the past . . . in a contemporary setting [they] are discordant anachronisms when juxtaposed with today's proven female intellectualism and physical ability."

While ruling that a gay student had a right to bring his same-sex mate to a Cumberland High School prom, Pettine rejected School Department arguments that it had banned the gay men to protect them from gay-bashing students: "To rule otherwise would completely subvert free speech in the schools by granting other students a 'heckler's veto,' allowing them to decide -- through prohibited and violent methods -- what speech will be heard. The First Amendment does not tolerate mob rule by uruly school children."

And in perhaps the most far-reaching decision of his 30 years on the bench, Pettine wrote in 1977: "The conditions under which inmates in Rhode Island exist shocked the Court, and the Court is convinced that they would shock the conscience of any reasonable citizen who had a first-hand opportunity to review them."

The prisoner's rights case was filed in 1974 alleging unconstitutional living conditions. Before issuing his ruling in 1977, Pettine took an unannounced, two-hour tour of the Adult Correctional Institutions to witness the conditions.

The judge's 100-page brief included his personal observations of the prison. The cellblock was so cold that inmates and guards wore heavy coats around the clock. Glass, cat feces and dead cockroaches littered the shower room floor.

"Trash abounds on the floors and in empty cells. The entire structure is massively infested with cockroaches, rodents, mice and rats, each of which carries disease throughout the prison.

"Colostomy bags are simply deposited with other trash in a garbage barrel in the infirmary dormitory," Pettine wrote.

Pettine's first ruling in the prison case came in 1977, in favor of the inmates. He called some buildings unfit for human habitation, and thus began a constant vigil that he maintained through 1991.

"Prisoners file more petitions than snowflakes in a blizzard," then-Gov. Philip W. Noel groused at the time, "and he listens to every one of them."

But time mellowed Noel's stance on the prison issue: "I was younger," Noel told the Journal in a 1993 interview. "I was much tougher, less tolerant, than I am now. So he and I had some philosophical disagreements. But I admired and respected him then, and I do now. I think he's an outstanding jurist, one of our most illustrious public servants."

In the early years of Pettine's law career, few would have predicted that he would become a champion of civil rights issues. For 13 years, he worked as a prosecutor for the attorney general's office, during which he once read the entire text of Peyton Place to a jury while trying a bookshop owner for selling the racy novel to a minor.

Pettine's impassioned prosecution of the smutty 1957 bestseller was a sensation. It took him a week to read the book aloud, repeating some of the passages, to be sure the jury remembered them. Shrugging off defense arguments based on the First Amendment guarantee of free speech, he called the book "dynamite" in the hands of teenagers.

Although his eloquence persuaded the jury, Pettine said in a 1993 interview that the jury had been wrong.

Pettine said he knew at the time that he was arguing the wrong side of the case, but he made no apologies. His role then was to prosecute as vigorously as he could, regardless of his own opinions. And he was a pretty fair prosecutor.

In 1961, he was sworn in as the U.S. Attorney for Rhode Island. He was so successful that Robert F. Kennedy, U.S. attorney general in the early 1960s, called him one of the nation's top three federal prosecutors.

President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed him to the bench in 1966, just as the nation was navigating the shoals of social change.

In 1993, looking back on his years on the bench, Pettine said: "In all God's truth I must say, it is an awesome privilege to be a judge."

But it was a privilege that exacted a price. When Pettine, a practicing Roman Catholic, ruled against the Nativity scene, The Providence Journal-Bulletin printed a full page of letters, overwhelmingly opposing the decision.

"I could never understand why so many Catholic people held the Nativity case against me. And they really did, believe me when I tell you; I got some very, very vicious correspondence. Vicious correspondence."

Feelings grew so tense that Pettine stopped attending his church, St. Sebastian, and went to Mass at the Franciscan chapel on Weybosset Street.

On a personal level, Pettine said he didn't see how a Catholic could support the Nativity display in the first place. "You know, the birth of Christ is something that stands alone, and they just trivialized this in the way they wanted to display it.

"Then, as far as the law is concerned," he said, "I firmly believe this with great conviction: that there has to be a separation between church and state -- that one of the saving graces of this country is the fact that we are tolerant of all religions, and even of those who have no religion. And if we start breaking that down, we are going to be in an awful lot of trouble."

Sandra Lynch, a former law clerk of Pettine's who now sits on the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston, said in 1997 that Pettine was a "trailblazer, a very compassionate man with a deep-rooted sense of justice. The legal issues were never abstract issues for him. He knew how the law affects people's lives, for better or for worse, and was very careful in how he applied the law."

Burt Neuborne, a New York University law professor and a leading constitutional scholar, said in 1997 that "you usually think of a federal judge in terms of respect, intellect and honesty. But Judge Pettine elicited much warmer emotions. There aren't a lot of judges that I would call beloved, but he is."

Pettine was born July 6, 1912, on America Street, in Providence's Federal Hill neighborhood, the son of the late James and Aldina (Caruolo) Pettine. His father was a wigmaker in Italy, who worked in Providence as a barber.

Pettine took an early interest in the law. "I couldn't have been more than 8, 9 years of age, and I scrawled out a note to the dean of the Harvard Law School, and asked him, 'What do you have to do to become a lawyer?' And he answered my letter! . . . He told me to study hard, be a good boy, always have a dream, look forward, and 'someday you can become a lawyer.' "

From the day he entered public life, Pettine said, he never left a letter from a youngster unanswered.

Pettine was educated at Providence College and Boston University Law School. He enlisted in the Army in March 1941, eventually obtaining the rank of major. As a reservist, he attained the rank of colonel in the Judge Advocate General Corps.

Ironically, by all accounts Pettine the man -- his personal habits, lifestyle, sense of decency -- was the sort of old-fashioned gentleman his critics maintained could not exist in the kind of world they accused Pettine and his fellow liberals of creating. A family man of great warmth, Pettine had the manners and mannerisms of the Old World, as elegant as his suits.

He was devoted to his wife, Lidia, who died in 1988, and remained close to his only child, daughter Lydia Gillespie, until his death. For many years, he lived at 400 Angell St., in Providence, near Brown University.

Pettine continued sitting on the bench full-time through 1996, when, at 84, he was hospitalized with a minor stroke.

Pettine's sense of duty isolated him from his colleagues and his often controversial rulings alienated him from his social peers. In Pettine's 80s, his life outside the cloistered courthouse dwindled to what he described as "a boring routine" -- he'd fix himself something to eat, and while eating watch Jeopardy!; then he'd switch to CNN for the world news. Some nights there was one program he liked to watch: Murder, She Wrote.

But Pettine never felt bad that his calling had left him isolated. On the contrary, Pettine said, "It's a great source of satisfaction when you write an opinion that has a wide public impact. A great, extraordinary satisfaction," even if it cost him friends and led to personal abuse, as in the Nativity case. He was, after all, upholding what he referred to as "the very sacred structure of the Constitution itself!"

Pettine is survived by his daughter; a granddaughter, Lauren Gillespie; and a son-in-law, Thomas Gillespie, all of Dallas.

A Mass of Christian Burial will be held Friday at 11 a.m. at St. Sebastian Church, 57 Cole Ave., Providence. Burial with military honors will follow at St. Ann Cemetery, Cranston.