G. C. Edwards Jr.; Federal Judge

George C. Edwards Jr., the former federal appeals judge who issued a ruling that banned secret wiretapping, died Saturday at age 80 of the complications of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases.

Edwards, a former Detroit police commissioner, auto worker and labor organizer, was chief judge of the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals from 1979 to 1983.

President John F. Kennedy had nominated Edwards to the Cincinnati-based court in 1963, and he was renominated by President Lyndon B. Johnson and confirmed over the objections of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and others because of his socialist and labor background.

In 1971, he ruled that wiretapping without court authorization was unconstitutional. The ruling upheld a Detroit federal judge’s decision in favor of Lawrence Robert Plamondon, a White Panther Party member awaiting trial on a charge that he and two others bombed a CIA office in Ann Arbor, Mich., in 1969.

John Mitchell, then U.S. attorney general, and the Justice Department appealed unsuccessfully to the 6th Circuit. Mitchell argued that he could authorize the use of wiretaps or hidden microphones to gather data about potential threats to national security.

In the majority opinion, Edwards wrote: “The government has not pointed to, and we do not find, one written phrase in the Constitution, in the statutory law, or in the case law of the United States, which exempts the president, the attorney general, or the federal law enforcement from the restrictions of the 4th Amendment in the case at hand.”