SJC Nominee Tells of Threats

SJC nominee tells of threats

Ireland recalls firestorm of reaction to 2003 same-sex marriage ruling

(Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff) Roderick L. Ireland was nominated by Governor Deval Patrick to succeed Chief Justice Margaret H. Marshall.

By Michael Levenson

Globe Staff / December 1, 2010

He and his family received death threats. His mailbox mysteriously disappeared, prompting the State Police to install a surveillance camera in his bedroom window. When he gave a lecture at Boston University on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a car service with an armed guard was sent to pick him up.

Justice Roderick L. Ireland said he knew, from Boston’s busing crisis, that a judge’s decision could spark violence. But nothing, he said, prepared him for the onslaught of anger he experienced in the tumultuous days after he signed the Supreme Judicial Court’s decision legalizing same-sex marriage in Massachusetts in 2003.

In a strikingly personal article in the New York University Law Review and a recent lecture at the law school, Ireland detailed the threats that hounded him at home, work, and church.

The searing experience was clearly a defining moment for the first black justice of the high court, who has been nominated by Governor Deval Patrick to become the court’s next chief justice. The Governor’s Council is holding a hearing on his nomination today.

“Knowing on an intellectual level that any judge may be the target of public ire is one thing; actually being made a target is quite another,’’ Ireland wrote in the article, published last month. “I recall that when Federal District Court Judge W. Arthur Garrity ordered the desegregation of schools in Boston in the 1970s, citizens picketed his house, and he had to be protected by bodyguards. This knowledge, however, did not prepare me adequately for the magnitude of public protest in response to our decision.’’

The lecture and article offer a rare view of life on the court during one of its most controversial periods and new insight into the extraordinary precautions taken even before the landmark decision was issued.

Ireland also opens a window into his views on race and racism and how they shaped his understanding of legal issues, including the debate over gay marriage.

Ireland recalled one particularly startling episode, when protesters opposed to gay marriage came to Eliot Congregational Church in Roxbury one Sunday and demanded his expulsion from the church where he was married and had worshiped for 40 years. Ireland spoke to the State Police, but declined their offer to have a trooper posted at the church. When protesters returned the following Sunday in greater numbers and disrupted the service again, they “nearly started a riot,’’ he wrote.

“I have often wondered about the group’s sense of entitlement and privilege in coming to a black church, in the heart of a black community, and whether it would have done the same in a white church, in an upper-income community,’’ he wrote.

Ireland said he is not sure if the three colleagues who joined him in the majority faced similar “intrusion into their personal space.’’ An SJC spokeswoman was also uncertain if other justices faced similar protests.

The title of the article and March lecture is: “In Goodridge’s Wake: Reflections on the Political, Public, and Personal Repercussions of the Massachusetts Same-Sex Marriage Cases.’’ They came to light in a list of Ireland’s writings released yesterday.

The article shows that, although Chief Justice Margaret H. Marshall, as lead author of the majority opinion, appeared to bear the brunt of the public backlash, Ireland endured his own ordeal.

And Ireland makes clear how his understanding of the marriage case was shaped by his own history growing up when segregation was legal.

He recalled that he was 10, visiting his grandparents in South Carolina the summer that Emmett Till, 14, was killed for reportedly whistling at a white woman. He recounted marrying the daughter of a white woman and a black man who had wed before the Supreme Court legalized interracial marriage. “I grew up in the climate of violent resistance to desegregation and racial equality,’’ he wrote.

That history figured in 2006, when Ireland became the only justice who voted to overturn a 1913 law that prohibited same-sex couples from other states from marrying in Masachusetts. The law, he wrote, violated the couples’ right to equal protection.

“I also was aware that this 1913 statute had been enacted at a time when some states were trying to prohibit interracial marriage,’’ Ireland wrote. “Although there was nothing in the available record to prove that racial animus was behind its passage in Massachusetts, I was cognizant of it as an undercurrent.’’

When the same-sex marriage case came before the court in 2003, Ireland wrote, the justices, anticipating a public firestorm and prying media, took extraordinary steps to keep their deliberations secret. The schedule to discuss the case was kept secret and off the court’s internal agenda. Even court officers were not informed when the case was being discussed, and the justices warned their law clerks not to talk to reporters.

To ensure “crowd control, as well as the safety of the justices and our staff,’’ the 4-3 decision was not released at the SJC building, but at a more secure courthouse several blocks away, Ireland wrote.

Immediately upon the decision’s release, Ireland wrote, the justices were bombarded with hundreds of letters and e-mails.

“We (and our decision) were called every name imaginable: ‘dumb,’ ‘nuts,’ ‘deplorable,’ ‘shameful,’ ‘sick,’ ‘an abomination,’ ‘traitors,’ ‘communists,’ and ‘atheist liberals,’ ’’ he said. The anger, he said, made him appreciate why judges are appointed, not elected, in Massachusetts.

Everywhere he went, Ireland wrote, he faced questions about gay marriage.

“I heard from family, friends, members of my church, lawyers, my barber, cabdrivers, and even complete strangers,’’ he wrote. “I had to explain to my elderly mother and even to my father-in-law, a retired state court judge, why I had voted the way I did.’’

Ultimately, Ireland wrote, the experience helped him appreciate the challenges judges face when they rule on explosive issues.

“Although some of the threats that I personally endured were disconcerting, to say the least, I viewed most of the public and private actions and comments as democracy in action,’’ he wrote. “This mindset helped me to focus on the actual issues in the cases and not on the spin ascribed to them by the media and others.’’

Michael Levenson can be reached at .