By Mary Frances Myler, The Federalist - Fifty-one years later, Roe’s damage continues... Just before his retirement in 1994, Justice Harry Blackmun, author of the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade, had a change of heart. He had previously voted in support of capital punishment but later changed his views on the death penalty. “From this day forward,” he said, “I shall no longer tinker with the machinery of death.” But he had already tinkered with death quite a bit — and not just with the death penalty. His change of heart was too little, too late.