Richard Conway Casey

Richard Conway Casey

Following Holy Cross and Georgetown, he had been a soldier and a legal investigator for the New York County district attorneys office and an assistant U.S. attorney, specializing in public corruption cases. When the Catholic lawyers of New York dedicated a shrine to St. Thomas More in my church, he was there with his guide dog, Barney. The retinitis pigmentosa, which had been diagnosed in 1964, led to complete blindness in 1987.

When I became blind, I didnt know a single individual who was blind. I didnt know if you just sat there and waited to die, or what you did. Youre facing life and what appears to be a grim future. The one thing you have is faith. His confirmation as the first blind federal trial judge in the nation followed a challenge in the Senate hearing. He reminded the Judiciary Committee that if justice is blind, a blind judge would not be at a disadvantage. There were problems physical, if not philosophical: On his first day on the bench, he walked into a wall. Eventually he mastered an optic scanner with synthetic voice, learned how to ski, and taught blind children the sport.

In 2004 he agonized over a decision on a technical point to rule against the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, but his questioning of witnesses over 16 days was as monumental as any obiter dictum at the Nuremburg trials. In redirect examination of one abortionist, he challenged euphemisms such as decompression of the skull and reducing the contents of the skull. He asked if a fetus feels pain. When the doctor replied that it never crossed his mind, the judge asked, Never? and gave the nation opportunity to hear the cold reply: No. He recalled how the abortionists did not tell the women in simple language that what youre doing is tearing the arms and legs off the body. Constitutional restraints did not prevent his declaration that partial-birth abortion is a gruesome, brutal, barbaric and uncivilized medical procedure. The final judgment was a Pyrrhic victory for the technicians, for judicial history will remember their silence in the courtroom when Casey asked what they would tell a mother to do if they knew her unborn child would be blind.

At one banquet of the Order of Malta, which he served as president of the American Order, he introduced from memory the 20 or so guests assembled on the dais. My last time seated with him was at a right-to-life dinner when my only help to him was to tell him that the vegetable on his plate was at three oclock and the meat was a quarter to twelve. But at his wake I was asked to read one of his orders prayers, with some of his fellow knights and his dog Barney guarding his coffin. Afterward, a gentleman expressed to me his sense that the prayers reference to enemies of religion was archaic in our tolerant society. That refined ignorance was not unfamiliar to Richard Casey, nor was it unknown to his patron Thomas More, and it was the ground of their mutual humor and sorrow.

In 1999, Pope John Paul II received him when he was awarded the Blessed Hyacinthe Cormier Medal at the Angelicum University for outstanding leadership in the promotion of Gospel Values in the field of justice and ethics. He remembered going to Lourdes when he went blind and being led to the grave of an atheist Italian girl who had been brought against her wishes to the shrine for a cure. She remained blind in eye, but transfigured in spirit. As an old lady she had asked to be buried near the spot where the Lady had appeared to Bernadette. The epitaph read to him was: What is important is not to see but to understand.