Tinkering With the Machinery of Death: Alabama Turns to Nitrogen to Execute a Condemned Person
Since the early days of capital punishment, our nation has moved from the hangman's noose to the gas chamber to the electric chair to lethal injection. Now we are facing a new machine—and a new dissenter on the Supreme Court.
February 01, 2024 at 10:05 AM
7 minute read
Constitutional LawIn 1994, the late Justice Harry Blackmun put his fellow Supreme Court justices on notice that he would no longer vote to uphold the execution of a condemned person. In a strongly worded dissent in the case of Callins v. Collins, Blackmun wrote: "From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death. For more than twenty years I have … struggled … to develop … rules that would lend more than the mere appearance of fairness to the death penalty. … Rather than continue to coddle the Court's delusion that … fairness has been achieved … I feel morally and intellectually obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed."
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