Posted: Sunday, January 27, 2013 12:11 pm | Updated: 12:01 am, Mon Jan 28,
2013.
Richmond Times-Dispatch
BY JEFF E. SCHAPIRO
jschapiro(a)timesdispatch.com
Harry L. Carrico, former chief justice of the Virginia Supreme Court and a
central figure in a breakthrough legal battle over interracial marriage and
the modernization of the state judiciary, died this morning in Richmond. He
was 96.
His death was announced in an email by the John Marshall Foundation, a legal
education organization with which he was long associated, and confirmed by
court officials.
Born in Fauquier County on Sept. 4, 1916, Mr. Carrico spent most of his
career as judge, starting in the juvenile and domestic relations court of
Fairfax County. From the Fairfax circuit court, Mr.. Carrico joined the
Supreme Court in 1961. He became chief justice 20 years later, retiring in
2003. Mr. Carrico continued to occasionally hear cases as a senior justice.
In 1966, Mr. Carrico wrote the Supreme Court decision upholding Virginia
miscegenation laws, which prohibited marriage between people of different
races. The court's unanimous ruling in Loving vs. Virginia -- the case of
white man and African-American woman married in Washington, DC, but living
in rural Caroline County -- was reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1967.
The couple, Richard and Mildred Loving, was represented by Bernard S. Cohen,
a future member of the House of Delegates who would unsuccessfully seek a
seat on the state Supreme Court late in Mr. Carrico's tenure as chief
justice.
Mr. Carrico, who was educated at George Washington University and its law
school, was succeeded by Virginia's first African-American chief justice,
the late Leroy R. Hassell Sr.