"Justice Blackmun begins his statement [declaring Blackmun's opposition to capital punishment] by describing with poignancy the death of a convicted murderer by lethal injection.
He chooses, as the case in which to make that statement, one of the less brutal of the murders that regularly come before us, the murder of a man ripped by a bullet suddenly and unexpectedly, with no opportunity to prepare himself and his affairs, and left to bleed to death on the floor of a tavern.
The death-by-injection which Justice Blackmun describes looks pretty desirable next to that. It looks even better next to some of the other cases currently before us, which Justice Blackmun did not select as the vehicle for his announcement that the death penalty is always unconstitutional, for example, the case of the 11-year-old girl raped by four men and then killed by stuffing her panties down her throat.
See McCollum v. North Carolina. How enviable a quiet death by lethal injection compared with that!âSupreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia
Callins v. Collins 510 U.S. 1141 (1994) (Scalia, J., concurring in denial of cert).
"The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all.
I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere."Thomas Jefferson