Harry Blackmun: Dissent in Callins v. Collins

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

A few months before his retirement from the Supreme Court, Justice Harry Blackmun used the case of Callins v. Collins to state his intention to never again vote in favor of capital punishment. While sitting on the Eighth Circuit and the Supreme Court he had registered his personal objections to capital punishment but had deferred to the states. However, in 1993 he and his clerks began drafting an opinion renouncing the death penalty as unconstitutional. He used it in Callins v. Collins.

Bruce Callins had killed a person during a robbery of a bar in Texas and had petitioned the Court for review of his death sentence. On February 22, 1994, the Court announced its denial of his petition in the face of his scheduled execution at one o'clock the following morning. Blackmun filed a lone twenty-two-page dissent. The opinion begins with a graphic description of how Callins was scheduled to die by lethal injection the next morning. It then surveys the Court's efforts, deemed unsuccessful by Blackmun, to regulate the death penalty so that its use would be fair and consistent. The opinion ends with Blackmun's declaration that “from this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death.” He explains that throughout his judicial career, he had struggled to delineate rules and procedures that would make the death penalty constitutional, but “the death penalty experiment has failed.” In his opinion, no combination of rules and regulations can fix the fact that the death penalty is unconstitutional. Conservative pundits immediately latched on to Justice Scalia's concurrence, in which he dismisses Blackmun's dissent as emotional and having no legal consequence. However, Blackmun's dissent remains one of the most quoted objections to capital punishment by courts as well as by those who are not lawyers. Callins was not executed until the following May. His lawyer wrote Blackmun, enclosing a letter from Callins expressing his gratitude. Blackmun in turn thanked the lawyer but not the inmate.