Penny J. White (born May 3, 1956) is an American attorney and former judge who is on the faculty of the University of Tennessee College of Law. She was a Tennessee circuit court judge, a member of the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals, and a justice of the Tennessee Supreme Court before being removed from office in a judicial retention election. She is the only Tennessee judge ever to lose a judicial retention election under the Tennessee Plan.
Early life and education
White was born in Kingsport, Tennessee in 1956. She attended East Tennessee State University (ETSU), graduating with a B.S. degree in 1978. At ETSU she was the first female president of the Student Government Association. After graduation, she went on to study law at the University of Tennessee College of Law, where she was awarded the J.D. degree in 1981, and Georgetown University Law Center, where she was awarded an LL.M. degree in 1987.
Legal and judicial career
White engaged in the private practice of law in Johnson City, Tennessee, from 1981 to 1983 and from 1985 to 1990. From 1983 to 1985 she served as supervising attorney and clinical instructor in the Georgetown University Law Center Criminal Justice Clinic.
Penny White impressed Justice Scalia and the Supreme Court when she appeared before them at the age of 32. The New Yorker article on Scalia note: "In a 1988 speech, Justice Harry Blackmun, who retired in 1994, recalled how Scalia had grilled a lawyer named Penny White, a thirty-two-year-old solo practitioner from Johnson City, Tennessee. He "picked on her and picked on her and picked on her, and she gave it back to him," Blackmun said. "Finally, at the end of the case we walked off, and Nino said the only thing he could say: 'Wasn't she good? Wasn't she good?' The rest of us were completely silent. We knew she was very good."
In 1990, she won election to a judgeship in Tennessee's First Judicial Circuit. In 1992 she left the circuit judgeship when Tennessee Governor Ned McWherter appointed her to the state's Court of Criminal Appeals. She served on that court until 1994, when McWherter selected her to fill a vacancy on the Tennessee Supreme Court. She became the second woman ever to serve on the state's highest court.
Vote on judicial retention
White became a subject of controversy in 1996 when she voted with the court majority in the 3-2 decision in the case of State v. Odom. That June 3, 1996 decision upheld a conviction for the rape and murder of an elderly woman, but overturned a death sentence in the case on the grounds that the combination of rape with murder did not meet the requirements for the death penalty because the rape did not cause the murder to be "especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel in that it involved torture or serious physical abuse beyond that necessary to produce death." It was the only death penalty decision that White ever participated in as a member of the state supreme court. In a law review article published several years later, White wrote that Tennessee law at the time of the case allowed capital punishment and that she would have voted to affirm a death sentence "that was imposed in accordance with the law."
While a member of the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals, as well as the Tennessee Supreme Court White was criticized for at least three opinions on capital murder cases. Suzanne Collins, a 19 year old female Marine was assaulted, kidnapped, beaten, and ultimately killed by having a 31 inch tree branch thrust between her legs so deeply it penetrated her vital organs and punctured a lung. Sedley Alley was convicted and sentenced to death. Tennessee State Trooper Doug Tripp was shot 12 times in the head and torso in two separate volleys from a suspect while sitting in his cruiser. 78 year old Mina Ethel Johnson was raped, and repeatedly stabbed during an attack by Richard Odom. In the Collins and Johnson cases White's opinion was that these murders did not meet the definition of "especially heinous, atrocious, and cruel". In the Trooper Tripp case, White held there was not sufficient evidence of premeditation, and the charge was reduced to 2nd degree murder. Trooper Tripp's killer was paroled after 17 years.