Ricardo M. Urbina, a pioneering Latino lawyer who won for civil liberties as a sympathetic federal judge and for civil rights as a groundbreaking track star record — which helped spur a historic rally at the 1968 Olympics — died Monday in Washington. He was 79 years old.
His son, Ian Urbina, said his death in an assisted living facility was due to complications from Parkinson’s disease.
Judge Urbina, the first Latino appointed to the Superior Court of the District of Columbia and the U.S. District Court in Washington, has been most prominent in cases stemming from the federal government’s war on terror and That puts him at odds with the President’s administration. Mr. George W. Bush.
In 2007, he extended habeas corpus rights to Shawqi Ahmad Omara Jordanian and US citizen is about to be transferred to Iraqi custody to be tried as a terrorist.
In 2008, Judge Urbina ordered the release of a number of prisoners being held at the Guantánamo Bay detention center in Cuba, including 17 people from Uyghur Muslims minority in Western China. They have been imprisoned since 2002, but a judge ruled that they do not pose a threat to US security.
In 2009, Judge Urbina dismissed the indictment of five Blackwater Worldwide security guards who pleaded not guilty in the shooting deaths of 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad’s Nisour Square while the security guards were on the job. under U.S. government contract to escort an embassy convoy.
The judge accused the State Department lawyers of “recklessly violating the defendants’ constitutional rights” by saying they could be fired if they refused to be interviewed about the massacre and claimed will not be used against them in a criminal proceeding. Court of Appeals reinstates charges against four guards; they did convicted in 2014.
In 2010, Judge Urbina upheld the District of Columbia’s strict gun regulations, but his ruling was invalidated by an appeals court, whose opinion was adopted by the U.S. Supreme Court. confirm.
As the first Latino federal judge in the District of Columbia, Judge Urbina worked tirelessly to be “not the first and only person,” said Kenia Seoane Lopez, a Superior Court judge in Washington. best”. “He demonstrates the highest level of dignity, integrity and commitment”
Ricardo Manuel Urbina was born on January 31, 1946 in Manhattan and grew up in East Harlem and then in Jackson Heights, Queens, where he moved with his family when he was eight years old. His father, Luis, an immigrant from Honduras, was a machinist. His mother, Ramona (Hernandez) Urbina, originally from Puerto Rico, was a secretary.
Ricardo was a middle-distance track star in high school and college. He won the national championship in the 880-yard dash at Monsignor McClancy Memorial High School in Queens, where he graduated in 1963, and while a student at Georgetown University. in 1966.
In May of that year, The New York Times describes His performance at the New York Athletic Club meet in Pelham Manor, NY, where he finished in one minute and 48.3 seconds, was “exceptional under the circumstances.” (It was not allowed as a meeting record, The Times reported, simply because the starting gun was fired before any official at the starting line blew the whistle to alert the stopwatch.)
Two weeks later, at the NCAA championships in Bloomington, Ind., he finished in third place. one minute 47.9 seconds.
Judge Urbina graduated from Georgetown in 1967 with degrees in English and Spanish culture. “I started college and tried to fulfill my parents’ wish that they have a doctor in the family — but organic chemistry ate me alive,” he recalled in an interview with Columbia University. . Oral history center in 2013.
He was studying law at Georgetown when he was denied admission to the Association. New York Athletic Club, where he will be the first Black member. That’s the club Times described in 1967 as a “stronghold of white Christianity,” considered a preeminent training ground for college graduates hoping to make the U.S. Olympic team.
He was told only that the athletics membership “quota” had been met, but in a 1968 interview with The Hoya, Georgetown’s student newspaper, Judge Urbina blamed for “NYAC’s 100-year history of discrimination against blacks, Jews, and other minorities”
Judge Urbina is listed as white on his birth certificate, but he identifies as black, like his mother. At the time, he said he was less interested in becoming a symbol of the Black Power movement than in inspiring young Puerto Ricans, like those who cheered him on the track with chants of “Vaya, Ricardo”.
“I learned a lot from sports that I couldn’t have learned at home or at school,” he said. Times in 1967. “I learned to persevere at something, to believe in myself and others, like a coach, and to look at everyone equally.”
He missed the 1968 Olympic team in the trials by less than a second.
His refusal in October 1967 led the Black Panthers to organize the Millrose Olympics at Madison Square Garden and caused a boycott of the 1968 track meet by the Track Club, also at the Garden. The protest attracted the support of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Jackie Robinson and Muhammad Ali as well as black American sprinters Tommie Smith and Lee Evans.
Six months later, in what some considered the climax of his ordeal with the NYAC, during the medal ceremony for the 200-meter sprint at the Olympics in Mexico City, Mr. Smith and campaigned Black American runner John Carlos, silently protested the plight of African Americans, raised a black-gloved fist as the US national anthem played and bowed away from the American flag.
Decades later, Judge Urbina’s nephew Aidan described the episode in the school history project as “one of the most iconic black protests in modern history.”
After graduating from law school, Judge Urbina worked as a public defender, practiced law privately and taught at Howard University School of Law. He was appointed by President Ronald Reagan as an associate judge of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia in 1981 and nominated by President Bill Clinton to the District Court in 1994. He retired in 2012.
In addition to his son, Ian, a former reporter for Times and director of Outlaw Ocean Project, a human rights and environmental journalism group, Judge Urbina is survived by a daughter, Adrienne Jennifer Urbina; his wife, Coreen (Saxe) Urbina; brothers Louie and Alberto Urbina; and his nephew. His first marriage to Joanne Elizabeth McCarron ended in divorce.
Judge Urbina was very creative in sentencing the defendants. He asked some to write books about their transgressions to help explain the impact their actions had on themselves and others, and he required most of them to appear before him six months later. once a month to measure their progress.
According to him, he meditated daily and learned the Japanese martial art Aikido when he was in his 50s. a 2011 profile in The Washington Post.
“I try to see where my biases and prejudices that day are hiding,” he told The Post. “If you don’t find them, they tend to appear at the most unusual times.”
His top priority, he said, is rehabilitation to bring the defendants back into society. “I have no interest in punishment,” he said. “If there is some way that the court can contribute to the rehabilitation process, then it is more likely that the person will return to a normal life.”
