Thwarted Judge to Testify Today

John Ashcroft blocked Ronnie L. White from becoming a federal district judge.

Now it’s payback time.

That at least is the expectation as White steps before the Senate Judiciary Committee today to testify against Ashcroft’s nomination as attorney general. It’s a much-hyped moment.

But as revenge dramas go, it may be rather dry.

For White is not a fireworks-and-fury kind of guy. The first adjective his friends use to describe him is “quiet.” He’s focused. Low-key. Soft-spoken. All business. “Just sort of unassuming,” one friend said. Another recalled seeing him agitated only once: on a turbulent small-plane ride across Missouri when, sweating buckets, he appeared terrified of crashing.

“I don’t think I ever saw him lose his temper,” said Missouri state Sen. Paula Carter, a longtime friend.

Yet that’s not to say White is mellow.

In fact, his soaring career path--from janitor at a burger joint to the first African American judge on the Missouri Supreme Court--testifies to his intensity.

As a child growing up in St. Louis, he was bused to an integrated school, where his classmates threw milk at him and told him to go home. “It made me more determined to stay,” he recalled. White put himself through community college and law school--while supporting a son he had fathered out of wedlock at age 19--by making auto parts on an assembly line. He demanded the same hard work of his son and arranged a legal settlement obligating him to pay child support only as long as his son was a full-time student. When the boy dropped out of high school, White stopped his monthly checks.

“You always knew that if Ronnie said something, he meant it,” said his former colleague in the Missouri Legislature, state Sen. Ted House. “He’s a man of integrity.”

Yet somewhere along the line, White, 47, managed to run afoul of another soft-spoken lawyer often described as a man of integrity: Ashcroft.

Ashcroft has made several public statements about White--and about why he worked so hard to derail his appointment to the federal bench. They boil down to one chief criticism: that White, as a Missouri Supreme Court judge, has been alarmingly soft on crime.

Ashcroft has accused White of being “pro-criminal,” with “a serious bias . . . against the death penalty.” He has cited in particular White’s vote to commute the death sentence of a man who killed a sheriff, two deputies and another sheriff’s wife.

As a judge, White has had to be circumspect in responding to such charges. But his friends have observed no such restraint. Pointing out that White voted to uphold the death penalty more often than several of his colleagues--including some judges appointed by Ashcroft--they dismissed the “soft on crime” label as a pretext. The real reason Ashcroft opposed White, they argued, is racism.

President Clinton picked up the charge.

Missouri Democrats used it to rally black voters.

And suddenly White--who ascended to the Supreme Court saying that he hoped one day to be seen not as the black judge but as “the judge who happens to be black”--was a symbol, held out as a victim of racial animus, his very name a code word for Ashcroft’s alleged bigotry.

In his one public statement on the matter, White signaled that he accepted this interpretation. Speaking before the Missouri Bar Assn. in September, he said he worried that the Senate’s rejection of him might have a “chilling effect” on young African Americans, leading some to conclude that pushing for a judicial career wasn’t worth the trouble.

“I don’t know if racism was involved” in the campaign against his federal appointment, he said, “but I think the public is smart enough to draw their own conclusions.”

White is sure to address the racism question in his testimony today.

He has proved in the past that he can be blunt on the topic: In 1996, for instance, he accused a lower court judge of making an “indefensibly racist” statement insinuating that minorities are lazy. That remark alone, he wrote, while issued in a press release unrelated to court business, should have disqualified the judge from presiding over the death penalty trial of a black man accused of murder. In another opinion, White castigated a different judge for remarks that “reek of racial animus.”

Few observers expect White to make such a categorical denunciation of Ashcroft.

“He’s going to speak his mind, but I don’t expect him to do it in a mean-spirited, vindictive way by calling John Ashcroft some terrible name,” said St. Louis Mayor Clarence Harmon, a longtime friend.

Indeed, some friends said they expected White to try to focus his testimony on his own judicial record rather than on Ashcroft’s behavior toward him. “I think he has a lot of pride in his record, and he’ll be eager to defend it,” said state Rep. Phil Smith, another former colleague.

That record begins in 1994, when White was appointed to the Missouri Court of Appeals after serving four low-profile years in the state Legislature. After just a year on the appeals court bench, White was elevated to the state Supreme Court. It was there, Ashcroft has charged, that White showed “a tremendous [sympathy for] criminal activity,” voting to reverse 30% of the death penalty cases he reviewed. (In the majority of those decisions, he was joined by all six other justices. In three cases, however, his was the lone vote against the death sentence. And in five others, he was in the minority.)

For all the focus on those death-penalty reviews, several political analysts in Missouri suggest, the real root of Ashcroft’s animosity toward White lies in a different issue altogether: abortion.

As a state legislator, White maneuvered to kill an anti-abortion bill that Ashcroft, who was then governor, ardently supported. Ashcroft’s allies accused White of fudging parliamentary rules to ensure the bill would never make it out of committee. Some involved in that dispute say Ashcroft never forgave White. But Ashcroft himself has alluded to the incident only indirectly, saying he had received complaints from constituents about White’s “manipulation of legislative procedures” as a state representative.

Aside from that one incident, White’s tenure as a state representative was noncontroversial. Friends from those days remember him as a good public servant who took care to meet constituent needs--but not as someone fired up about a career of stumping and spinning.

Not long after he was appointed to the Supreme Court, in fact, White spoke with his old friend Harmon, who had just been elected mayor of St. Louis. “He looked at me with pity in his eyes,” Harmon recalled. “He said he was glad to be out of politics.”