Word: blackmun
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Presidents sometimes get better Supreme Court Justices than they deserve. After two mediocre nominees were rejected by the Senate in 1969-70, Richard Nixon finally chose Harry Blackmun, a prim Midwestern Republican the President knew could be confirmed and one he hoped would be a predictable lapdog to Chief Justice Warren Burger. Burger had been Blackmun's grade-school classmate in St. Paul, Minnesota, and had recommended...
Nixon was right on the first count -- the only criticism of Blackmun at his confirmation hearings was that the Eighth Circuit judge worked too hard -- but wrong on the second. By the time "Old No. 3," as Blackmun called himself, announced his retirement last week, he had become the court's most reliable liberal voice. "This is a guy who came to the court thinking it was the role of the court to defer to government," says Yale law professor Harold Koh. But as Blackmun read the cases, he realized not all government was good. Only when a Democrat...
...Hance execution comes in the midst of growing scrutiny of the death penalty. A month ago, Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun wrote an impassioned dissent in which he concluded that "the death-penalty experiment has failed." By contrast, Justice Antonin Scalia, a supporter of capital punishment who is fed up with last-minute appeals before the court, last week chastised a defense lawyer for waiting too long to seek a federal stay for a Texas execution. That outburst came during arguments for a case involving a federal court's right to intervene in a state execution. Tempers may grow even...
...probably wasn't the only one whose lips puckered on hearing the news of Justice Harry J. Blackmun's impending retirement. I mean no disrespect to the justice (nothing excessive, anyhow)--I simply relish the possibility of witnessing yet again that greatest of American political spectacles: the Senate confirmation hearings...
...related killing is a capital crime. Those on the front lines are appalled. "I know of no law-enforcement professional who believes the ((new)) death-penalty provisions would affect public safety in the slightest," says Robert Morgenthau, Manhattan's respected district attorney. Equally troublesome, declared Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, the death penalty "remains fraught with arbitrariness, discrimination, caprice and mistake." According to a 1987 Stanford University survey, at least 23 Americans have been wrongly executed in the 20th century. Just since 1973 an additional 48 have been freed from death row when evidence of their innocence surfaced before their...