Harry A. Blackmun

Harry A. Blackmun registers in the series as a discursive, authoritative Supreme Court voice whose late-career repudiation of capital punishment furnishes decisive moral and legal weight. Characters summon his 1994 reversal—most notably the line expressing refusal to "tinker with the machinery of death"—to anchor urgent pleas against execution and to shift debates from procedural arguments to conscience. He remains off-screen but functions as an enduring jurisprudential touchstone, shaping executive and advocacy decisions through cited precedent and moral legitimacy.