The cause was Parkinson's disease, said his son Ian.
Urbina never competed in the Olympics, but his attempts to break racial barriers by seeking training facilities and support at the New York Athletic Club rallied black protesters and galvanized a powerful (but ultimately unsuccessful) movement to boycott the Mexico City Olympics.
During the Olympics on October 16, 1968, American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos stood on the medal stand after the 200-meter race. As “The Star-Spangled Banner” began to play, Smith, the gold medalist, raised his black-gloved right fist in a black power gesture. Carlos, who won the bronze medal, raised his left fist in one of the most famous Olympic protest gestures.
Urbina has never supported an Olympic boycott because he believes it would only hurt the athletes who work so hard for that moment, but he says his experience during the civil rights movement and his brief time in the spotlight afterward helped shape his legal philosophy.
“That's when I decided to go to law school to make a difference,” he said.
A star middle-distance runner at Georgetown University, he thrilled the crowds at Madison Square Garden in 1966 when he narrowly beat Seton Hall's Herb German in the 880-yard dash, a race that made the front pages of New York newspapers. After graduating in 1967, he began studying law at Georgetown University while setting his sights on the upcoming Olympics.
Hoping to gain an edge in his training for the Olympic Trials, he applied for membership at the venerable New York Athletic Club in June 1967. He already held some of the fastest times in the country in the 800 meters and the half-mile, but there were many competitors who were just as fast. “Unfortunately, we are oversubscribed in the number of track and field athletes competing at your club,” the NYAC wrote in response.
To the 21-year-old Urbina (whose mother is from Puerto Rico and father is from Honduras), the rejection seemed like racism. He later said he never expected to be accepted by the club; he wanted to make a statement. Club officials denied the allegations of racism but noted that the club was a private organization and had the power to determine membership. At that point, only white players competed under the club's name, a policy that would not change until the 1980s.
Urbina made his case publicly: In an open letter to sportswriters, he urged athletes to stand up against “hatred, bigotry and discrimination.” National figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and boxer Muhammad Ali expressed their support.
In February 1968, before a major NYAC indoor track and field meet at Madison Square Garden to mark the club's 100th anniversary, Urbina (then known widely as Rick or Ricky) called on black players to refrain from participating in the meet in protest of NYAC policy. “It shows the bond between the players,” Urbina told reporters.
Several Catholic universities withdrew in a show of solidarity, the Soviet team canceled its competition, and Ralph Boston, the black long jumper who won the bronze medal in Mexico City, also withdrew.
Some black athletes were blocked by a picket line that included members of the Black Panther Party and leaders of the Olympic boycott movement. “Police swung batons as protesters stormed through barricades,” the Associated Press reported of a melee outside the stadium. “Both officers and protesters were knocked down during the scuffle.”
A track and field championship to narrow the field of Olympic hopefuls was held in Sacramento in June, about two months after the assassination of Martin Luther King and the riots that ripped through many U.S. cities. Urbina represented a mostly black New York track and field club known as the Grand Street Boys. He finished last in the preliminaries and was not selected.
On the way to the airport, Urbina's family received news that he had been given a wild card into the next round of qualifying at the Los Angeles Coliseum, with the top competitors moving on to the high-altitude Olympic qualifier at Echo Summit near Lake Tahoe in Mexico City.
Urbina was in the middle of a pack of runners with 100 meters to go, all with a chance to advance to the next stage. He lost steam in the final few strides and finished last in 1 minute, 49 seconds, just 0.8 seconds shy of taking the lead.
During his more than 30-year tenure as a judge, Judge Urbina was as likely to speak of the mind-body connection and the discipline of sports as he was to reference legal scholars and precedents when discussing his approach to jurisprudence.
He holds a black belt in the Japanese martial art of aikido, which he began studying after intervening to stop an assault in the 1990s. “I thought maybe I needed to learn some kind of self-defense,” he says. He meditated daily on a blue mat in a sunny second-floor room in his Washington, DC, home.
“I try to identify where my biases and preconceived ideas are hiding that day,” he told The Washington Post in 2012. “If you don't find them, they tend to come out when you least expect them. … The mind is like a murky glass of water, and meditation is like letting the sediment settle until the water becomes clear.”
Ricardo Manuel Urbina was born in Manhattan on January 31, 1946. His father was a machinist and his mother was a secretary.
After graduating from Georgetown University Law Center in 1971, he worked in the Washington, D.C., public defender's office until 1972, then practiced law for two years. He taught at Howard University School of Law from 1974 to 1981, after which he became an assistant judge on the district's superior court.
In 1994, he was nominated by President Bill Clinton to be a U.S. District Court judge and confirmed by the Senate.
During his nearly two decades as a federal judge, he was often involved in high-profile cases related to the US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. His rulings on challenges to US detention at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba led to the release of prisoners, including from a group of ethnic Uighurs no longer classified as “enemy combatants” by the US.
In a 2009 decision, he stunned the Justice Department when he dismissed charges against five former security guards for Blackwater, the contractor who carried out a shooting spree in Baghdad's Nisour Square that killed 17 Iraqis in 2007. Urbina concluded that the defendants faced a “reckless violation” of their constitutional rights because prosecutors used statements from nonpublic reports from the State Department and security contractors who used Blackwater to protect diplomats and other envoys.
The bloodshed further strained relations between the Iraqi government and the Bush administration and highlighted America's growing reliance on private security companies in war zones. (Four former employees of Blackwater, which changed its name several times, were later convicted in connection with the 2007 shooting.)
In a landmark decision for the District in 2010, Judge Urbina upheld the constitutionality of D.C.'s gun laws after retired security guard Dick Heller challenged city rules requiring registration procedures and regulating assault weapons and extended magazines.
For defendants, Judge Urbina favored innovative sentencing options over harsh sentences, sometimes requiring defendants to write essays about their lives and actions, and required most defendants to return to court every six months to monitor their progress on probation or prison supervision.
“I'm not passionate about punishment,” he told The Washington Post. “If there's a way that the courts can contribute to the rehabilitation process, that increases the chances that the person will be reintegrated into society.”
His marriage to Joan Elizabeth McCarron ended in divorce. Survivors include his wife of 46 years. He is survived by his wife, Colleen Sacks; his son Ian Urbina and daughter Adrienne Jennifer Urbina from his first marriage; two brothers; and one grandchild.
Judge Urbina once recalled turning down an offer to represent Puerto Rico in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and saying he felt a dispute with the New York Athletic Club had hurt his chances of making the 1968 Olympic team.
“Looking back, I see missed opportunities that were later taken away for reasons related to skin color, ethnicity, race,” he said in an oral history in 2021. “That compounded my feelings of disappointment, not just because of what was denied, but also because of how the country felt and how it protected people who felt comfortable cutting ties.”
