Harry A. Blackmun Quotes About Death Penalty

• From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death. For more than 20 years I have endeavored - indeed, I have struggled - along with a majority of this Court, to develop procedural and substantive rules that would lend more than the mere appearance of fairness to the death penalty endeavor. Rather than continue to coddle the Court's delusion that the desired level of fairness has been achieved and the need for regulation eviscerated, I feel morally and intellectually obligated to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed.

  Harry A. Blackmun

  Years, Majority, Needs

  "Bruce Edwin Callins v. James A. Collins 510 U.S. 1141". The U.S. Supreme Court case No. 93-7054, www.law.cornell.edu. February 22, 1994.

• From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death. ... I fell morally and intellectually obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed.

  Harry A. Blackmun

  Motivational, Death Penalty, Penalties

• I am more optimistic though, that this court will eventually conclude that the effort to eliminate arbitrariness while preserving fairness in the infliction of [death] is so plainly doomed to failure that is - and the death penalty - must be abandoned altogether. I may not live to see that day, but I have faith that eventually it will arrive.

  Harry A. Blackmun

  Optimistic, Effort, May

• I cannot see any of these death penalty cases where there hasn't been a violation on the ground of either poverty or race. If we can ever get that straightened out, it will help. But, of course, the real answer to it is to do away with the death penalty.

  Harry A. Blackmun

  Real, Race, Answers

• Of one thing, however, I am certain. Just as an execution without adequate safeguards is unacceptable, so too is an execution when the condemned prisoner can prove that he is innocent. The execution of a person who can show that he is innocent comes perilously close to simple murder.

  Harry A. Blackmun

  Simple, Adequate, Execution

• From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death.

  Harry A. Blackmun

  Tinkering, Death Penalty, Human Rights

  Callins v.Collins (dissenting opinion) (1994)

• The death penalty experiment has failed.

  Harry A. Blackmun

  Death Penalty, Human Rights, Penalties

  "Bruce Edwin Callins v. James A. Collins 510 U.S. 1141". The U.S. Supreme Court case No. 93-7054, www.law.cornell.edu. February 22, 1994.

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