Sandra Day O’Connor will lie in repose at the Supreme Court before her funeral service.
O'Connor was the first woman to serve as a justice in the nation’s highest court. She died on Dec. 1 at the age of 93.
To honor her passing, her body will lie in the court’s Great Hall on Dec. 18. The current justices and their family members attended a private memorial ceremony in the morning. From 10:30 A.M. to 8 P.M., the public is permitted to view O’Connor’s casket to pay their respects.
“The last justice who lay in repose at the court was Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the second female justice,” reports ABC News. “After her death in 2020, during the coronavirus pandemic, mourners passed by her casket outside the building, on the portico at the top of the steps.”
President Joe Biden is in Willington, Delaware and did not attend the private service at the court. He is scheduled to attend O’Connor’s funeral in Washington, D.C. at the National Cathedral on Dec. 19. The president and Chief Justice John Roberts will both deliver eulogies at the service.
Roberts acknowledged O’Connor’s passing before the court presided over Harrington v. Purdue Pharma, a bankruptcy case stemming from opioid-crisis-related settlements.
“She was, in her own words, a cowgirl from the Arizona desert,” Roberts said on Dec. 4, per SCOTUS Blog.
“Always putting one foot in front of the other — ‘just do it,’ she would say — she changed the world,” Roberts said. “Participants in the morning aerobics class Justice O’Connor founded at the Supreme Court would hear about it if they missed a session. Lunch together for the justices was in her view mandatory to promote collegiality.”
“With irresistible force of will and constant motion, she yoked the justices together — and pressed forward,” he added. “Justice O’Connor made our country better by her work and her example.”
O’Connor was 93 when she died of complications associated with dementia and respiratory illness. She joined the Supreme Court in 1981 after being appointed by President Ronald Reagan. She retired from the court in 2006 to care for her ailing husband. She continued to advocate for judicial independence and founded iCivics, which offers free, educational online games for students to develop their understanding of civics.
In 2009, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama.
O’Connor fully retired from public life in 2018.
“When she hit about 86 years old she decided that it was time to slow things down, that she’d accomplished most of what she set out to do in her post-retirement years, that she was getting older physically and her memory was starting to be more challenging, so the time came to dial back her public life,” said her son, Jay O’Connor, in an interview, per CNBC.
