David Bazelon; Retired Appellate Judge

David L. Bazelon, the retired jurist who established a reputation for liberalism that defined societal and legal issues on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, has died of pneumonia at age 83.

Bazelon, who pioneered the application of psychiatry to criminal law in expanding the insanity defense, served more than 30 years on the appellate court before stepping down in 1985, citing memory problems. He had Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases and died Friday at his home in Washington.

During his tenure on the bench, Bazelon produced landmark rulings extending the rights of criminal defendants.

His decisions also ranged from such disparate issues as the use of presidential power during the Richard Nixon Administration to the use of the insecticide DDT to nuclear power.

In 1954, he established a new definition of insanity as a defense in criminal cases. Before his ruling, the test was whether the defendant knew right from wrong. But Bazelon introduced the idea that an accused defendant was not responsible for his actions if he was the product of a mental disease or defect.

Bazelon (pronounced Baa-zeh-lawn) once wrote that his underlying purpose was “to unfreeze the expanding knowledge of psychiatry as it could be applied to the law.”

Bazelon also was involved in several other major cases.

In a McCarthy-era opinion, he upheld the right of individuals to refuse to answer questions from the anti-Communist congressional committee that were not shown to be pertinent to the inquiry.

In 1973, he upheld Judge John J. Sirica’s ruling that Nixon had to hand over certain tape recordings to the Watergate grand jury and that claims of executive privilege were invalid.

Other decisions included a 1966 ruling that patients in public mental institutions were entitled to treatment; a 1971 order directing the Environmental Protection Agency to cancel all uses of DDT, and a 1977 ruling barring newspapers from owning radio or television stations in the same city.

His opinions brought him into conflict with Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, who had served earlier with Bazelon on the appellate court.

Justice William H. Rehnquist, speaking for the Burger court in 1978, charged Bazelon with “judicial intervention run riot” after the high court overturned a Bazelon court decision to block the operation of nuclear reactors in Vermont.

At 40, Bazelon was the youngest judge ever named to the federal appellate bench when President Harry S. Truman appointed him to the Court of Appeals in Washington in 1949. Bazelon became chief judge in 1962 and led the court’s liberal majority until stepping down in 1978. In 1979, he accepted senior status on the court and continued to occasionally hear cases and write opinions until 1985.

Born in Wisconsin in 1909, he was the youngest of nine children of a poor merchant who died when Bazelon was 2.

He worked as a clerk and usher to pay his way through Northwestern University Law School and entered private practice in Chicago. In 1935 he was named an assistant U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois.

Although political opposites, it was FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover who encouraged him to seek a post in the Justice Department and later recommended his appointment to the judiciary.