Blackmun

Wade decision was drafted by Justice Harry Blackmun, a Nixon appointee.

But gone also are the judicial giants — men like William Brennan and Harry Blackmun — who were nominated by presidents of the opposing political party.

That system, what Justice Harry Blackmun once called “the machinery of death,” makes it possible to speak and act as inhumanely as Lumpkin did.

In Blackmun’s words, it “lessens us all.”

Three years after Powell acknowledged his death penalty regrets, Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun discussed his own change of heart while still serving on the bench.