A MATTER OF JUSTICE: FEDERAL JUDGE, 80, CONTINUES TO CHALLENGE TEXAS
OFFICIALS

AUSTIN -- Age has not weakened the old lion's roar.

U.S. District Judge William Wayne Justice, 80, continues to rattle Texas
governors and lawmakers.

His scathing 175-page opinion last month finding that the state Medicaid
program denies health care to more than a million children was vintage
Justice, supporters said.

Detractors called it an overbearing federal judge's continued meddling in
state affairs.

Texas Gov. George W. Bush dismissed it as coming from "an activist, liberal
judge." The Democratic National Committee used it in a TV campaign spot
blasting Bush's record.

Involved in many controversial decisions, the judge who has supervised the
state prison system for a quarter-century has won the respect of state
officials who disagreed with him.

"Judge Justice hit the state of Texas between the eyes with a 2-by-4, but in
the historical perspective, his rulings were fair, what was needed for Texas
and based on the Constitution," said former Attorney General Jim Mattox, a
Democrat known as the "bulldog of Texas politics."

Those who hoped that Justice's decision to take senior status and move from
Tyler to Austin two years ago signaled a move toward retirement should note:
The 32-year veteran on the federal bench has no plans to hang up his robe.

"I dread idleness," Justice said last week in his chambers at the Homer
Thornberry Judicial Building a few blocks from the Capitol. "As long as I
feel good and capable of doing the work, I think I'll continue."

Those who worked for Justice recall a role model and a great mentor.

"I never met anybody with so much power and responsibility as a federal
district judge who was so unapologetic about asking questions," said San
Francisco lawyer Daniel Gunther, a Stanford Law School graduate who clerked
for Justice in 1986-1988 and now works for a resource center for death
penalty appeals.

Justice handles about one-third of the criminal caseload of the Western
District's Del Rio division and a few active civil-rights cases back from
the old days in the Eastern District. He keeps a full-time schedule.

Last month, he sentenced 87 defendants. He estimated that about 70 percent
of the cases involved violations of immigration laws, such as illegal entry
or smuggling of undocumented workers, and the rest were drug offenders.

These sentences break up families, a fact not lost on the judge. "Men are
permanently separated from their families," Justice said. "These tragedies
play out daily."

He makes the 250-mile trip to Del Rio once a month, zipping down the
highways in a little black sports car, a Mitsubishi 3000 GT SL.

The border cases are a far cry from the civil-rights battles back in Tyler,
where some conservatives regarded him as the most hated man in Texas.
Liberals saw a patron saint for prisoners, minorities, immigrants, juvenile
delinquents, the mentally retarded and other groups on the fringes of
society.

Appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968, Justice ordered public
schools and public housing desegregated. He ordered reforms of the state's
prison system, scolding state officials for prison overcrowding and
conditions that included beatings, rapes and inadequate health care. He
ruled that public schools couldn't charge tuition for the children of
undocumented aliens.

"I did not have a mission except do what I was supposed to do -- to follow
the Constitution and the law and do equal justice to the poor and to the
rich," Justice said.

He continues to oversee class-action cases involving prison reform, public
housing desegregation and access to Medicaid for poor children and
juveniles.

The prison reform case, Ruiz vs. Estelle, is one of the nation's
longest-running civil-rights cases.

Justice ordered sweeping reforms that covered every facet of prison life.
Among the key provisions: He ordered the Texas Department of Corrections to
reduce overcrowding immediately by restoring "good time" credits and parole;
he set ceilings on the numbers of inmates the prisons system could house and
told TDC to expand the space per prisoner confined to a dormitory to sixty
square feet; he ordered that more guards be hired to increase inmates'
safety; and he told corrections officials to expand prisoner work release
and furlough programs.

Citing the judge's continued supervision of the state prisons, critics say
it's time to let go.

State Rep. John Culberson, R-Houston, accused the judge of having "a sort of
instinctive willingness ... to substitute his personal authority for the
will of the voters on many occasions."

Justice has a policy not to comment on pending cases, citing the code of
judicial conduct.

Although Justice's decisions embarrassed state officials and forced them to
shift fiscal priorities to comply with his orders on prison reform and other
issues, they won't deny that he forced necessary reforms.

"I think, first of all, that Judge Justice is a fine, outstanding Texan,"
said former Gov. Bill Clements, a Republican in office during several of
Justice's landmark rulings. "He's a gentleman, he's a thoughtful person. I
was satisfied that, as a judge, he was making the right, well-thought-out
decisions."

Mattox said, "He's truly an activist federal judge, but one who propelled
the state of Texas into doing the right thing more often than not."

Many of the reforms would not have occurred so soon without him, Mattox
said.

"He brought about reforms at the Department of Corrections that were
seriously needed as we were dealing with the expansion of the prison
population taking place in Texas," Mattox said.

Former Gov. Mark White, a Democrat, said, "There is no question that he
propelled the state into re-examining conditions that existed in prison
institutions and other areas."

White said Justice initially took him by surprise.

"He was a lot more aggressive than I would have expected from a federal
court, and I felt that he may have overstepped his authority on several
occasions," White said, "but he was a very fair judge."

State officials seldom kept the upper hand in battles with the judge. White
still remembers one victory.

"Judge Justice had ordered single cells for prisoners in Texas, but the 5th
Circuit [U.S. Court of Appeals] reversed it," White said.

Looking back on his career, Justice quickly picked the case involving
tuition-free education for the children of undocumented aliens as his most
important.

The class-action suit, Doe vs. Plyler, was brought in 1977, two years after
the state passed a law excluding noncitizens from a tuition-free public
education, to deter illegal immigration.

"I could find no law that covered that particular subject directly to the
point," Justice said. "I wanted to hold that the law was in violation of the
equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

"The Constitution talks about "persons," not "citizens." But then I backed
away from that and ruled that the law lacked rationality. It was so designed
that it could not accomplish its intended purpose."

Justice is proud that his ruling was upheld by the 5th Circuit and the U.S.
Supreme Court.

He's a Democrat but says his personal politics never affected his rulings.

Some of the brightest law school graduates in the country are eager to clerk
for him. Past clerks have included graduates of Harvard, Yale, Stanford and
the University of Texas who became accomplished lawyers.

Marianne Wesson, a law professor at the University of Colorado, a novelist
and former federal prosecutor, has long admired Justice.

"In the fall of 1972, most of my law school colleagues at UT were looking
for jobs at the big firms in Houston and Dallas," Wesson said "I had heard
about this federal judge in East Texas who had desegregated the schools and
reformed the prisons. I was the first woman he ever hired as a clerk."

The judge was a very exacting boss who set "extremely high standards,"
Wesson said.

"He was very passionate about his work," Wesson said. "He knew that his
decisions would be controversial. He knew they had to be very well-reasoned
and considerate to withstand the controversy."

It was heartbreaking for Wesson and other supporters to see Justice and his
family ostracized in his native East Texas.

Justice, after all, was the son of highly respected East Texas prosecutor
and criminal defense lawyer Will Justice.

He received hate mail. Workers remodeling his home walked off the job in
protest during the early 1970s after his ruling on school desegregation.
Almost 4,000 Tyler residents signed a petition to impeach him. His wife
could not find a hairdresser in Tyler.

Justice was the target of a murder plot. The white-supremacist group, The
Order, responsible for the murder of a Denver talk radio host and several
bank heists, had Justice on a hit list for leaders considered enemies of the
white race after his 1983 ruling on public housing desegregation.

Justice only learned about the plot while reading newspaper accounts of the
trial for the leaders of The Order.

"You let me know in the future if I am on a hit list," he told the resident
FBI agent in Tyler.

Despite the hate mail and the hit list, Justice said he never took any
extraordinary security precautions. He had windows and doors covered with
bars to guard against burglars, nothing more, Justice said.

"I'm not going to be a prisoner," he said.

He moved to Austin to be close to his only child, daughter Ellen, her
husband and his granddaughter, Jane.

Justice says his busy legal career never gave him enough time to indulge in
any serious hobbies.

He's a self-described movie devotee and a voracious reader -- anything from
detective fiction to more demanding fare, such as Ian McEwen's modern
morality tale, `Amsterdam.'

A portrait of his wife of 53 years, Sue, the woman who stood by his side in
tough times, is prominently displayed on his large, wooden desk.

"I'm a blessed man," Justice said, proudly looking at the photograph. "Isn't
she beautiful?"

Toni Heinzl, (817) 390-7684

Send comments to theinzl@star-telegram.com