http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2015/06/supreme_court_and_solitary_confinement_justice_anthony_kennedy_finds_it.html

On Feb. 22, 1994, Justice Harry Blackmun handed down one of the most famous Supreme Court opinions of all time. Dissenting from the court’s decision to allow the execution of Bruce Edwin Callins, Blackmun graphically described Callins’ impending execution. The prisoner, Blackmun wrote, will “no longer be a defendant,” but “a man, strapped to a gurney, and seconds away from extinction.” Blackmun could not condone that fate. After years of struggling to enforce the death penalty fairly, Blackmun wrote, he was now convinced the entire system was unconstitutionally “cruel and unusual.”