Capital Punishment

Emotions might have played a part in the Furman decision. Burger, in his dissent, warned that the Court's "constitutional inquiry … must be divorced from personal feelings as to the morality and efficacy of the death penalty." Justice HARRY A. BLACKMUN, who joined Burger in his dissent, later renounced his belief in the death penalty for reasons that another justice saw as partly personal.

In 1994, in Callins v. Collins, 510 U.S. 1141, 114 S. Ct. 1127, 127 L. Ed. 2d 435, Blackmun wrote a dissenting opinion in which he condemned the practice of capital punishment in the United States. He argued that "no combination of procedural rules or substantive regulations ever [could] save the death penalty from its inherent constitutional deficiencies"—"arbitrariness, discrimination, caprice, and mistake." Justice ANTONIN SCALIA criticized Blackmun's position, writing that Blackmun had based his dissent on intellectual, moral, and personal reasons, rather than on the authority of the Constitution.