Harry A. Blackmun is born in Nashville, Illinois. He spent his early years in St. Paul and returned to the area after earning a degree from Harvard Law School. President Richard Nixon appointed him to the US Supreme Court on April 14, 1970. Blackmun is remembered for authoring the 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, which made abortion legal in the United States, and for retracting his support for the death penalty in 1994 by writing, "I shall no longer tinker with the machinery of death." He died on March 4, 1999.