BAD DAY FOR "HEROES" OF MODERN JURISPRUDENCE:

Howell Heflin, Former Alabama Senator, Dies at 83
By ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON, March 29 - Former Senator Howell Heflin of Alabama, a conservative Democrat who supported civil rights legislation and was sometimes described as the conscience of the Senate, died on Tuesday at a hospital in Sheffield, Ala., near his home in Tuscumbia. He was 83.

His death was announced by his family.

Mr. Heflin, a large, bearlike man, was chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court before he was elected in 1978 to the Senate, where he served for 18 years.

Fellow senators often called him Judge Heflin, referring to his probity and his judicious approach to issues. For 13 years, he passed judgment on his colleagues as a senior member or chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Ethics.

Mr. Heflin voted against the nominations of Clarence Thomas and Robert H. Bork to the United States Supreme Court. He said Mr. Thomas's testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee suggested "contradictions, lack of scholarship, lack of conviction and instability."
Whatever else may have been true of Mr. Heflin, he authored one deeply despicable moment in the Senate when he tried to get himself off the hook with his constituents for voting against Robert Bork by accusing him of having a "strange lifestyle." But he got paid back in the end, even if indirectly:

Mr. Heflin was a swing voter on the Judiciary Committee, often siding with Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina and other conservative Republicans.

But in 1986, Mr. Heflin voted against a lawyer from his home state who had been nominated by President Ronald Reagan to be a federal district judge. Several civil rights groups opposed the lawyer, Jeff Sessions, on the ground that he had shown insensitivity to blacks while serving as the United States attorney in Mobile, Ala.

The Judiciary Committee blocked the nomination. Mr. Heflin said he did not know whether Mr. Sessions would be "a fair and impartial judge." But the tables eventually turned. In 1996, Mr. Sessions, a Republican, won the Senate seat being vacated by Mr. Heflin, and he now serves on the Judiciary Committee.