Phila Judge Lisa Richette dies - trailblazing feminist

[dancingme]

LISA AVERSA RICHETTE, a brilliant but controversial jurist who cared for battered women, the homeless, children at risk, the mentally ill and long-term prisoners, died of lung cancer on Friday. The 79-year-old judge was being cared for at Vitas Hospice inside St. Agnes Continuing Care Center in South Philadelphia.

An alumna of Girls High School and the University of Pennsylvania, she was one of five women in the 1952 graduating class at Yale Law School.

In New Haven, she become the administrator of the Yale Study Unit Research Center for Psychiatry and Law. At the Children's Center, she had an experience that would shape her life's work and exasperate her critics.

She worked with 13 emotionally disturbed children, ages six to 11, and became deeply concerned about the genesis of crime and the effects of the family environment on criminal behavior.

In the district attorney's office, she became part of a vanguard of exceptionally bright, young, energetic prosecutors under District Attorney Richardson Dilworth, who with Mayor Joseph Clark, had wrested municipal political power from the Republican Party after decades of control by the GOP.

Ten years later, she wrote these observations in her groundbreaking book, Throwaway Children, still used in some college classes.

Richette briefly opened a law practice before Gov. Milton Shapp appointed her to the Common Pleas bench in 1971.

She was a trailblazing feminist before the word was coined and single-handedly changed the mores of the Philadelphia Bar Association.

"She once showed up in court wearing a conservative pantsuit. A judge held her in contempt," recalled Wallace. "She took him to the state Supreme Court and won." Soon, male attorneys were wearing two-tone shirts, he added. Richette, who fought for the rights of rape victims, once excoriated a Daily News letter writer: "Women are not helped by forcing them to go public as rape victims to satisfy some misguided distortion of feminism."

In the 1970s, Richette and Frank Rizzo clashed when he was elected mayor, dubbing her "Let 'em Loose Lisa," a phrase picked up nearly 30 years later by Charlton Heston, the actor who became head of the National Rifle Association.

She confronted both men. Richette's husband was a Rizzo supporter who divorced his wife of 13 years and later demanded that she stop using his name after she married Vero Ajello, a marketing executive. She refused, saying she was known as "Judge Richette" - and the high court agreed.

By 1978, President Jimmy Carter was considering Richette to be the first woman appointed to the U.S. District Court here, but she inexplicably withdrew her name.

One of her last acts on the bench, recalled Peter Maggio, was to save an infant from a Frankford crack house.

"Many calls were made to the heads of city departments. Everyone said there was nothing anyone could do as all procedures were being followed," he added.

"One call to Lisa, and the deed was done. She saved another child."

http://www.philly.com/dailynews/local/10858147.html

[GoneOffShore]

1. We'll miss her

and never see her like again here in Philly.