A Trigg County native who served as a well-respected United States District Court judge passed away Saturday.
According to Goodwin Funeral Home in Cadiz, 83-year-old Clyde Roger Vinson, of Pensacola, Florida, passed away following a battle with prostate cancer. Vinson served as chief judge of the 23-county Northern District of Florida from 1997 to 2004. He also served on the highly secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court from 2006 to 2013.
Vinson graduated from Trigg County High School at 17, skipping sixth grade. He served as state president of the Future Farmers of America, leading an organization of around 10,000 teenagers pursuing careers in agriculture.
Following graduation, Vinson spent a year at the University of Kentucky. The next year, he began his naval career as a midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, a prestigious honor achieved through a Congressional appointment. He would earn a degree in engineering and serve as a U.S. Naval Aviator.
In 1968, Vinson enrolled at Vanderbilt University Law School in Nashville as a recipient of the Patrick Wilson Scholarship. Upon graduation in 1971, he joined the law firm now known as Beggs & Lane, Florida’s oldest law firm, where he practiced general civil law for 12 years. Vinson was nominated to be a judge for the Northern District of Florida by President Ronald Reagan. Following a speedy confirmation in the Senate, he was sworn into office on November 4, 1983, at the age of 43.
A year after taking the bench, Vinson was assigned the first of many cases garnering national attention, the infamous Christmas Day 1984 abortion clinic bombings. In 1994, Judge Vinson presided over the high-profile federal trial of Paul Hill for shooting and killing an abortion provider and his bodyguard outside a Pensacola women’s clinic.
Also, in 2010, Judge Vinson granted a challenge brought by 26 state attorneys general against the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, the legislation commonly known as Obamacare. His 78-page decision concluded it violated the Commerce Clause of the Constitution.
Moreover, Judge Vinson ruled that the flaws could not be severed, rendering the entire act unconstitutional.
He was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1997 and was cancer-free for 22 years, it would return aggressively in 2019.
