How Diversity Derailed the Constitution

In 1994, shortly before his retirement, Justice Harry Blackmun announced a shift in his thinking about the death penalty. After years of struggling to make the administration of the death penalty sufficiently fair to comply with the 8th Amendment’s ban on “cruel and unusual punishments,” Blackmun concluded that the Supreme Court’s “death penalty experiment has failed.” He therefore could no longer “tinker with the machinery of death.”