Reno, Janet

Person

Reno, Janet

1938-2016

Janet Reno (1938-2016) was an American lawyer who was both the first woman to serve as a State Attorney for Florida - she served Dade County (now Miami Dade) from 1978-1993 - and also the first woman to serve as the Attorney General of the United States. Reno was nominated for Attorney General by President Bill Clinton in 1993 and served until 2001, making her the second-longest serving Attorney General in U.S. history, after William Wirt. Characterized for what has variously been described as her “plain-vanilla style,” (qtd. in Williams) or more generously, her “understated and self-effacing manner, both public and private,” (Santelle) Reno’s career, however, was not without controversies. Notable cases over which she presided, including the 1993 Waco siege where the Branch Davidian compound was raided, and the 2000 case of Elián González, made her a target of intense public scrutiny. More so, throughout her life in the public eye, Reno’s physical appearance (she was 6 feet 1 inch tall) garnered consistent - and frequently obsessive - press attention. Williams notes, “She is doubtless also the first human in that office to be so objectified by body parts and personal attributes.” Though diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 1995, Reno remained steadfastly determined to continue to serve as Attorney General until 2001; her unwavering dedication and sense of moral obligation to those whom she advocated for, even in times of tumult, is perhaps how she will best be remembered.

Reno was born on July 21st 1938 in Miami, Florida, to a family with a long track record of chronicling the city’s unfolding history; her mother and father were both reporters, writing for The Miami News and The Miami Herald respectively (though, as a woman, her mother wrote under a male pseudonym), and her grandfather was a photographer who photographed the building of Miami. Reno was principally raised in a modest home made of cyprus and brick on the border of the Florida Everglades, which her mother built with her own hands - a fact that would later garner her the dubious term of endearment, “swamp girl,” (qtd. in Williams) from the news media. After graduating from Coral Gables Senior High School Reno enrolled at Cornell University in 1956, where she majored in Chemistry. After graduating from Cornell in 1960, Reno then enrolled in Harvard Law School as one of only sixteen women in a class of 500. Once a lawyer, Reno practiced in Miami for two law firms from 1963-1971. After joining the staff of the Judiciary Committee of the Florida House of Representatives and accepting a position with Dade County’s State Attorney’s Office, Reno went on to eventually become State Attorney herself in 1978 and held this position until becoming Attorney General.

As would be expected during Reno’s tenure as State Attorney, but perhaps less so in context of her role as Attorney general, Miami figured as a pivotal space in her career. In 1980, Reno was the lead prosecutor in the Arthur McDuffie trial; she indicted four white police officers with charges of manslaughter/second-degree murder for the death of black insurance salesman, Arthur McDuffie, and charged a further officer with evidence tampering after the fact. Though considered an open-shut case, an all-white jury in Tampa, FL, nevertheless acquitted the police officers of the charges. Enraged by the blatant miscarriage of justice, rebellions erupted in Liberty City, the Black Grove, Overtown, and Brownsville; three days later, eighteen people were dead, over four hundred were injured, and there was $100 million of property damage.1 Reno was (at least, partially) blamed for the outcome of the trial; however, many of her critics were impressed by the way that in the weeks and months following the trial she visited Liberty City at night without police escort in order to console and share her disappointment with residents. She was equally the subject of Miami-based scrutiny after her decision in the Elián González case; Cuban-born González was staying with relatives in Miami after his mother and stepfather died at sea during the voyage to the U.S. and, after his father had won a case petitioning for the custody of the child, Reno made the decision to seize González from the relative’s home and return him to his father in Cuba. After the decision was made, there were protests in Miami organized by the city’s large Cuban-American population that explicitly targeted Reno.

Reno’s reputation for doing what she thought was right carried throughout her entire career - even when her decisions led to tragic outcomes such as the Waco siege, which she later described as “the worst day of [her] life” (qtd. in Santelle). From early on, Reno advocated for the vulnerable at times when the legal justice system did not recognize such vulnerability. In 1998 she wrote, “When I took office in 1978, everybody laughed at me for being concerned about domestic violence … if I brought a domestic violence case when the victim didn’t want to prosecute, the court looked at me as if I were crazy (Reno 78). Motivated by her desire that “nobody falls through the cracks,” (Reno 76) Reno wrote and spoke extensively on the need for improvements in child education, increased funds for the juvenile court system, and preventative rather than punitive measures in addressing crime rates.

Until the very end of her life, Reno remained active in her advocacy. After her role as Attorney General ended, Reno ran for Governor of Florida in 2002 and lost; this loss marked her retirement from politics in the official sense, though she continued to work in other capacities. She toured the U.S. giving talks about education and criminal justice reform and also served on the founding board of directors for the Innocence Project - a nonprofit organization that uses DNA testing to exonerate people who have been wrongly-convicted of crimes. In 2009, Reno was awarded the Justice Award by the American Judicature Society, which is the highest honor bestowed by the AJS. On November 7th, 2016, in the house built by her mother that she grew up in, Reno succumbed to the effects of the Parkinson’s disease that she had lived with for two decades; she was surrounded by friends and family at the time of her death. In her last will and testament, she bequeathed her “correspondence, memorandums, reports, journals, diaries, and files … relating to [her] service as State Attorney and Attorney General of the United States”2 to the University of Miami Special Collections.

Laura Bass
UGrow Fellow for the Department of Manuscripts and Archives Management, 2019-2020.

Notes

1. The University of Miami’s Special Collections and the Law Library’s Florida Collection have a number of additional holdings pertaining to the 1980 Miami rebellions. For example, see: Robert A. Ladner. Community Attitudes and Riot Participation in the Miami Riots of 1980: Social Change, Ethnic Competition and Urban Conflict. 1981. Coral Gables Behavioral Science Research Institute, University of Miami Library Special Collections; Robert A. Ladner. The Miami Riots of 1980: Historical Antecedents and Riot Participation. 1981. Coral Gables Behavioral Science Research Institute, University of Miami Library Special Collections; Bruce Porter and Marvin Dunn. The Miami Riot of 1980: Crossing the Bounds. 1984. Lexington, University of Miami Law Library Florida Collections; Robert Allen Hardin. Miami, From Quiet to Riot: An Alternative Viewpoint of The Miami Herald’s Role in Events Leading to the Riots of May, 1980. 1980. Keyes-Hardin Productions, University of Miami Library Special Collections; Liberta Randolf. Riot City 1984: Miami 1980. 1981. University of Miami Library Special Collections; Julian Williams. Gloom Over Miami: A Comparative Analysis of the 1980 Miami Rebellion. 1999. University of Miami Library Special Collections; Daryl B. Harris, The Logic of Black Urban Rebellions: Challenging the Dynamics of White Domination in Miami. Praeger, 1999.

2. Janet Reno. Janet Reno Papers. University of Miami Library Special Collections, Miami.

Works Cited

Reno, Janet. “Taking America Back for Our Children.” Crime and Delinquency, vol. 44, no. 1, pp. 75-82.

--. Janet Reno Papers. University of Miami Library Special Collections, Miami.

Roca, Gustavo. Protest in Support of Elián González in Miami, Florida. 2000. Photograph. University of Miami Cuban Heritage Collection, Miami.

Santelle, James R. “The Janet Reno I remember.” Wisconsin Lawyer, vol. 90, no. 6, 2017, www.wisbar.org/NewsPublications/WisconsinLawyer/Pages/Article.aspx?Volume=90&Issue=6&ArticleID=25671. Accessed 11 Sept. 2019.

Williams, Maureen. “The Gentle General: Janet Reno’s ‘Consubstantiality’ with the Press.” Women and Language, vol. 18, no. 2, 1995, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A18499213/AONE?u=miami_richter&sid=AONE&xid=7e6202aa. Accessed 11 Sept. 2019.

Attorney General of the United States (1993-2001)

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Bio created by Laura Bass, UGrow Fellow for the Department of Manuscripts and Archives Management, 2019-2020.