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In 1991, at a time when violent crime was ravaging cities, Sandra Day O’Connor was writing an opinion that would put more money into the pockets of serial killers.
It’s not her most famous opinion. The Supreme Court’s first female justice—who died of complications related to advanced dementia and a respiratory illness on Dec. 1 at the age of 93—tends to be associated with her rulings on Bush v. Gore and a pivotal abortion rights case. But in her majority opinion on the so-called Son of Sam law, O’Connor displayed the kind of politics-be-damned approach to jurisprudence that would come to define her as the court’s consummate swing vote.
Passed by New York state in the wake of David Berkowitz’s mid-’70s murder spree, the Son of Sam law stipulated that criminals must forfeit money they earned from books or movies about their crimes. The earnings would instead be given to the victims’ families—a heartfelt, charitable legislative gesture, and exactly the kind that rubbed O’Connor the wrong way.