Catherine Roraback, a lawyer who pressed the Connecticut case that eventually led the U.S. Supreme Court to rule that laws banning the use of contraceptives were unconstitutional, a precursor to its Roe vs. Wade decision on abortions, has died in Salisbury, Conn. She was 87.
Her death Wednesday was confirmed by a cousin, Andrew Roraback.
Ms. Roraback was the lead lawyer in several other controversial cases in her 50-year career, including the 1971 trial of the Black Panther leader Bobby Seale in the killing of another member of the group.
In the early 1960s, Ms. Roraback represented Estelle Griswold, then the executive director of Planned Parenthood in Connecticut, and Dr. Charles Buxton, the chief of obstetrics and gynecology at Yale University’s School of Medicine, as their case rose through the state courts.
For years, Griswold and Buxton had fought to overturn an 1849 state law that prohibited the use and prescription of contraceptives. When their efforts failed, they decided to break the law by opening a birth-control clinic in New Haven.
Three days after it opened, the clinic was raided by detectives.
With Ms. Roraback representing them, Griswold and Buxton were found guilty; then she began the appeals. In 1965, a noted 1st Amendment scholar, Thomas Emerson, argued the case of Griswold vs. Connecticut before the Supreme Court. In a 7-2 decision, the court found that the “statute forbidding use of contraceptives violates the right of marital privacy, which is within the penumbra of specific guarantees of the Bill of Rights.”
“It was simply a bad law,” Ms. Roraback told The Times in 1989. “People were concerned about controlling world population, and felt that outlawing contraceptives was out of step with the time.”
Griswold vs. Connecticut applied only to birth control for married couples. But in 1972, the Supreme Court extended the principles of Griswold to unmarried couples. A year later, it expanded the privacy concept to abortions in Roe vs. Wade.
In 1972, Ms. Roraback was a lawyer in Women vs. Connecticut, the case in which the state’s anti-abortion law was overturned. A year later she successfully argued a case in which a federal judge ruled that Connecticut must pay for a welfare recipient’s abortion if a doctor certifies that it is necessary.
Soon after graduating from Yale law school, Ms. Roraback helped found the Connecticut Civil Liberties Union. Her lifelong mission, she said in her profile as an inductee into the Connecticut Women’s Hall of Fame, was to protect the rights of “dissenters and the dispossessed.”
One of her most controversial cases was the 1971 trial of Seale, the Black Panther leader, and of Ericka Huggins, a party member, in the kidnapping and killing of Alex Rackley. The state contended that Rackley, also a Black Panther, had been beaten, burned and shot to death in May 1969 while being interrogated about police infiltration of the organization.
The central question in the case was whether Seale or the state’s star witness, who had already pleaded guilty, had ordered the killing. The case ended in a mistrial.
