Watch Video: How Sandra Day O'Connor made history on a houseboatīursts of interest in the court are a reminder of O'Connor's outsized importance to it. "It's the same pressures, the same stress just because of the nature of it being a historic appointment." "It very much took me back to Justice O'Connor's appointment," McGregor said. Supreme Court, said the recent events have reminded her of what she witnessed. Ruth McGregor, the former chief justice of the Arizona Supreme Court and a clerk for O'Connor during her historic first term on the U.S. Circuit judge is the first Black woman nominated to the court and would be the first to join if she is confirmed as expected.īeyond that, the Supreme Court is set to hand down a momentous ruling within months that could allow significant rollbacks in abortion rights across the country with a case that revisits the issue that O'Connor settled - at least for a while - a generation ago.Ī history: Sandra Day O'Connor - with a work ethic gained on a ranch - embodies Grand Canyon state Jackson's nomination, for one, is another historic milestone. The Arizona native retreated from public life in 2018 because of advancing dementia, but some of the same issues that defined her 25 years on the Supreme Court remain on the nation's front-burner. Sandra Day O'Connor, the first woman on the Supreme Court, quietly turns 92 Saturday as the Senate considers Ketanji Brown Jackson for a seat on the high court. O'Connor wrote that the Texas court ruling ''has no foundation in the decisions of this court'' and said the judges had relied on ''precisely the same 'screening test' we held constitutionally inadequate'' in a previous decision.View Gallery: Sandra Day O'Connor through the years Supreme Court that the instructions given to jurors had been constitutionally flawed. Last year, O'Connor criticized the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals for upholding a death sentence despite a ruling by the U.S. "She was sometimes appalled by the arguments that the Texas attorney general made, and the aggressive positions the state took," said George Kendall, a capital defense attorney from New York City who has worked on many cases before the Supreme Court. Circuit Court of Appeals, widely viewed as the nation's most conservative federal bench. O'Connor was among the Supreme Court justices who criticized Texas courts and the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. "That has frustrated the conservatives who have taken the strict constructionist view," said professor Paul McGreal of the South Texas College of Law. O'Connor often espoused a flexible view of the Constitution, backing the notion of "evolving standards of decency" as an explanation for why the court upheld the execution of a person with mental retardation in 1989, then outlawed the practice in a virtually identical case in 2002. ![]() In the coming years, the Supreme Court is likely to address issues including whether a state can execute people with severe mental illness and whether foreign nationals can be sentenced to death if they were deprived of their right to speak to the consul of their native country. She could be unpredictable, however, such as when she sided with fellow conservatives this year in dissenting against the decision barring capital punishment for crimes committed by people under age 18. ![]() Alito ready to break tie in death penalty case
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