Illinois' amiable U.S. senator in '80s, '90s
The New York Times
Alan Dixon, a two-term United States senator from Illinois in the 1980s and early '90s who was known for keen attention to constituents' needs and an old-fashioned glad-handing style that won him the nickname "Al the Pal," died Sunday at his home in Fairview Heights, Ill. He was 86.
His family announced the death. Dixon had suffered from heart problems.
Dixon befriended fellow Democrats, who elected him deputy whip of their Senate caucus, the No. 3 leadership position, as well as Republicans: He drank beers with President Ronald Reagan and admired the golf swing of Vice President Dan Quayle, according to a 2013 profile in The Washington Post.
Dixon held monthly lunches for Illinois Congressmen of both parties to discuss projects for the state on which they could all agree.
He successfully pushed legislation to aid mass transit in Illinois, expand Medicare financing, steer defense subcontractor money to the state and expand federal support for scientific research there.
But in 1992 -- after winning 29 consecutive elections to ever higher offices -- Dixon lost a primary for a third Senate term to Carol Moseley Braun, a fellow Democrat and the first black woman elected to the Senate. She had castigated him for supporting President George Bush's nomination of Judge Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court in the face of sexual harassment allegations by Anita Hill, a lawyer who had worked with the judge. Thomas denied the accusations.
U.S. judge noted for prison Playboy ruling
The Associated Press
RADFORD, Va. — U.S. District Judge James Turk, who struck down a Virginia policy that allowed prisoners to look at Playboy but not read classical works of literature with explicit sexual passages, died Sunday. He was 91.
Turk, a state senator for more than a decade, died at his home in Radford, according to De Vilbiss Funeral Home.
Turk was appointed to the U.S. District Court’s Western District of Virginia by President Richard Nixon in 1972 and became a senior judge in 2002. He never retired, continuing to work on notable cases throughout his final years.
In the prison literature case, an inmate sued after he was denied access to the novels Ulysses by James Joyce and Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence. Prison officials had argued that those sexually explicit materials were “considered valuable currency and used in bartering” by inmates, and that the possession of such items could lead to theft and fights. The judge disagreed.
In another case, Turk dismissed a lawsuit in 2011 filed by a Virginia inmate who wanted the state to pay for a sex-change operation. A three-judge panel of the 4th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals sent the case back to Turk in 2013, saying Ophelia De’Lonta’s case was entitled to a full hearing.
Turk ruled that the prison system was adequately treating her by providing counseling and hormone treatments and allowed her to dress as a woman in a men’s prison. She was paroled earlier this year.
Metro on 07/09/2014