Prominent judge, civic giant Lisa Richette dead at 79

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.

"She was flamboyant, outspoken, people respected her judicial acumen," said retired Common Pleas judge and longtime friend David N. Savitt. "She was her own person. She had her own dignity, her own way of acting. She was separate from the mold."

"We lost a great friend," said Richette's longtime spiritual director, the Rev. Robert Curry, who called her an "extraordinary woman whose intensity and devotion to so many causes were meant to improve the world."

These causes emanated from "a deep spirituality that few people would have suspected," he added.

Michael Wallace, an attorney and onetime colleague on the Common Pleas bench, said, "She had more guts than 90 percent of the male judges. She didn't care who was mad at her either. I loved her."

Said Common Pleas Judge Frederica Massiah-Jackson:

"The children of Philadelphia have lost one of their strongest advocates."

Attorney William Brennan called Richette "one of the last Philadelphia legends."

Born on Sept. 11, 1928, to Dominico and Maria Aversa, Richette grew up with her late brother Robert at 10th and Dudley streets in South Philadelphia.

She often talked about Depression-era discrimination against Italians that forced families to open small businesses catering to their own. Her father, a realtor, could not obtain mortgages for his clients, so he opened a small savings and loan firm.

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.

At Penn, she met her first husband, Irving Sandler, who became one of the foremost art critics of Abstract Expressionism. They married, and her father disowned her, she said, because Sandler was Jewish.

The marriage later ended, she said; they were "too young."

After graduation, she taught criminal law at Yale, the first of several universities, including Villanova, Temple and St. Joseph's.

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 1954, she returned home to become an assistant district attorney in the Family Court Division, which she soon headed. At that time, she said, top law firms refused to hire women - even with her impeccable legal credentials.

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.

Savitt recalled those heady days braving political and legal battles, which cemented a lifelong social and collegial friendship with Richette.

By 1958 she had married her second husband, attorney Lawrence Jarvis Richette. The Center City couple, whose fashionable home featured Italian antiques in the Venetian tradition, quickly became trendsetters.

Lisa's designer clothes turned heads, making her a perennial best-dressed winner in the Rittenhouse Square Easter Parade.

In 1959, the couple had a precocious son, Laurence.

A short time later, Barbara "Bobbie" Toplin, a friend, recalled, Richette spoke of her insights about children and crime in a criminology class at Temple University, wowing students and their professor, renowned sociologist Negley K. Teeters, a pioneer in prison reform.

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."

A recipient of many awards including the prestigious Gimbel Award and the Philadelphia Bowl, the highest honor given for contributions to the city, she founded organizations to help women and children, including Big Sister, a group home for women and children that was an alternative to jail, and CAPE, a hotline for child abuse.

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.

In the May 1977 Democratic primary, Richette was the endorsed Supreme Court candidate, but was defeated by Rolf Larsen, then a judge of the Allegheny County Common Pleas Court.

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.

The losses plus marital problems sent her reeling with clinical depression to the Phipps Psychiatric Clinic at Baltimore's Johns Hopkins Hospital.

Instead of hiding the depression, she talked openly and encouraged those with similar problems to get help.

A tap dancer in her youth, she read widely, loved theater and attended the opera regularly with Common Pleas Judges John Chiovero and Savitt and their wives. She also introduced them to the private Messina Club, where her driver, the late "Joe the Goat," would take her. During summers in Margate, she took friends to nearby Orsatti's restaurant.

Two of her dearest friends, Bill Brodsky and Fred Van Dyk, would chuckle when she'd show up at the Lombard Swim Club wearing her black judicial robe over her bikini. And she wore a bikini well into her 70s.

"She knew how to be a friend. She was there when you needed her," said Brodsky.

Her lavish dinner parties were not to be missed for their excellent cuisine, diverse personalities and scintillating conversation. An exceptional cook, she tried new recipes, but often relied on standbys of her mother. She refused to eat leftovers.

"She honestly believed the only place you could get good things was in South Philadelphia," shopping at Sonny D'Angelo's for meats, Claudio's for cheese and Termini Bakery for desserts, said Toplin.

"She was possibly Sarah's best customer," she added, referring to an exclusive dress shop on South Broad Street.

In court, Richette mentored young judges and law clerks, and served on panels encouraging women to run for office or for the bench. Meantime, she was a workhorse herself, handling 250 homicide cases a year where the defendants waived trials by jury.

"She wanted us to be forces to be reckoned with," said Judge Massiah-Jackson, elected in 1984 with three other black women.

Former law clerk NiaLena Caravosos said Richette helped her become a better criminal defense attorney by seeing defendants in a new light.

"You need to see these people as human beings, and open yourself up," the judge told her. "You'll be able to treat them and help them in a whole different way."

Richette never forgot longtime friends such as Juanita Kidd Stout, the first African-American woman elected to the Supreme Court. As Stout lay on her deathbed, Richette frequently visited, bringing books and court gossip.

Attorney Tom McGill invited Richette to meet his daughter's high school friends from Italy in an exchange program.

"When Judge Richette walked in the door and started speaking Italian, their eyes lit up, they were mesmerized," recalled McGill. "For children, she was everything. What a great loss."

In the early days of homelessness in the 1980s, Sister Mary Scullion recalled how Richette was "always available to get her advice and strategize" - and feed the homeless, despite recriminations by her critics.

"Even when things seemed impossible," Scullion said, "by talking to Lisa, I always gained strength. Her mind was so sharp and her heart was so huge.

"She wasn't afraid to advocate politically for the homeless," she added. The judge fought for the homeless to be fed at 30th Street Station and for changes to the zoning laws at Women of Hope, a facility for chronically mentally ill women, in Washington Square West.

"I honestly don't know a person in my life who suffered as much as she did," said Scullion, referring to Richette's private life.

In recent years, Richette became a crime victim three times. She was beaten and robbed twice on city streets, and punched in her head while sitting in her car.

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."

In late August, Richette was diagnosed with lung cancer in its deadliest fourth stage at Jefferson Hospital, after sustaining a cut on her forehead in a well-publicized incident involving her son.

Today, her son's preliminary hearing on charges of simple assault and recklessly endangering another person against his mother is expected to be postponed.

Her greatest love and greatest challenge was her own son. Given a choice between her son's well-being and others, including her own, she would always put her son first.

She had vowed she would not testify, and now she can't.

Richette apparently had lung cancer for months, if not years, without knowing it.

An addicted smoker, she refused to dine where she couldn't smoke.

"She was so intensely private, she didn't want anyone to know" about the cancer, said Dee Pallante, a young lawyer-friend who accompanied her to the doctor and cared for her daily.

Two days before she died at the hospice, Richette heard her son calling her. She opened her eyes. Her face lit up.

"Oh, Larry, it's so good to see you," she said in a voice as weak as her frail body. "I'm so glad you came." *