A justice’s moral conscience can override prior legal support for executions

Evidence

Blackmun’s strong personal opinions were essentially statements of conscience. In his dissenting opinion on a pending execution, he wrote that the case was “perilously close to simple murder” (Greenhouse, 1994). In his dissent in the 1972 Furman decision—in which he had upheld the death penalty—he described the personal moral toll of presiding over a system he regarded as unfair: “Cases such as these provide for me an excruciating agony of the spirit” (Greenhouse, 1994). In his concurring majority opinion in the 1994 Texas appeal, Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia argued that personal conviction was no excuse for banning the death penalty, which had been ruled constitutional and was not cruel and unusual punishment. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2075

Categorization

• QUESTION: Blackmun’s reversal, unlike Scalia’s rule-following, shows conscience breaking through institutional role — what psychological mechanism lets a judge who long upheld executions abandon them?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2075