Thomas P. Foy survived 44 months in a Japanese prison camp during World War II after enduring the Bataan Death March, and went on to become immersed in law and politics in southwestern New Mexico.
Foy, 96, a former state legislator and former 6th Judicial District attorney, died Saturday at his home in Bayard of what his family said were natural causes.
Early on, Foy displayed a willingness to fight unfair treatment. After he and other prisoners were moved in 1942 to a submarine base in southern Japan and told to clean up after American air raids, he and fellow prisoners of war refused. “We refused to do it under the Geneva Convention and we made it stick,” he told a reporter in 1973.
He was a regular participant in an annual Bataan memorial march at White Sands Missile Range, commemorating the April 1942 capture of about 70,000 American and Filipino troops who surrendered on the Philippines’ Bataan Peninsula. They were forced to trek 65 miles to prison camps without food or water; those who collapsed were shot or bayoneted.
Foy was elected district attorney for Grant and Hidalgo Counties in 1949, and served in the job until 1956.
Foy was a graduate of the University of Notre Dame, where he played football – a tradition followed by his lawyer son, Thomas Foy Jr., who died in a plane crash in California in 1986.
Foy, a Democrat, was elected to the New Mexico House of Representatives in 1971 with backing from labor. He chaired the Interim Equal Rights Committee in 1972 and was the prime sponsor of a bill package in the House designed to implement the Equal Rights Amendment to the New Mexico Constitution, focusing particularly on community property rights and distribution of estates.
During 28 years in the Legislature, he put his legal knowledge to work on dozens of issues, from reining in lotteries and bingo games to revising liquor laws and reforming the prison system.
In 1983, he carried a bill for a pilot program to broaden the pool of potential jurors by permitting jury lists to be drawn from driver’s license lists rather than solely from voter rolls. State courts now use driver’s license lists to call juries, though federal courts stick with voter lists.
As a legislator, Foy also sought stronger measures against juvenile crimes and tougher penalties for second-time DWI offenses.
Many in his family followed him into the legal profession. Daughter Celia Foy Castillo is chief judge of the New Mexico Court of Appeals, daughter-in-law Sue Jollensten is an attorney and Loren Foy, his granddaughter, is now clerking at the New Mexico Supreme Court.
Foy is also survived by daughter Muffet Foy Cuddy and sons J. Carney Foy and Jim Foy.
Funeral services are pending.
Reprint story -- Email the reporter at ssandlin@abqjournal.com. Call the reporter at 505-823-3568
