WASHINGTON — With the recent release of Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun's personal papers, many people have been looking closely at his observations on one specific case: the near overturn of legal abortion in a 1992 decision.

Blackmun's papers, all 1,585 boxes of them from his 24 years on the court, were made public March 4, exactly five years after his death. They provide a behind-the-scenes look at two decades of court decisions and shed particular light on just how closely the Planned Parenthood vs. Casey case in 1992 nearly went the other direction.

Within his files, stored at the Library of Congress, are several drafts of the Casey ruling with Blackmun's handwritten notes in the margins showing where he agreed with other justices or wanted to change their minds.

Particularly telling are notes about Justice Anthony Kennedy, who was initially voting in the Casey ruling to overturn the 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision written by Blackmun.

After writing the Roe majority opinion, Blackmun said he received more than 60,000 pieces of hate mail, a small sample of which is in the library collection of his papers.

The Casey case, which was upheld in a 5-4 vote, reaffirmed the "central holding" of the Roe decision but as a compromise position it also upheld four provisions of Pennsylvania's Abortion Control Act that it said would not pose "undue burden" on pregnant women, including informed consent, a waiting period, parental notification and other recordkeeping prior to abortions.

According to reports in Blackmun's files, Chief Justice William Rehnquist initially led a five-justice majority in the Casey case and he had been set to write the majority opinion when Justice Kennedy suddenly changed his mind.

Kennedy wrote to Blackmun saying he needed to see him whenever he "had a free moment."

"I want to tell you about a new development in Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, and at least part of what I say should come as welcome news," he wrote.

When Blackmun received Kennedy's note, according to his papers, he wrote the words "Roe sound" on a pink memo pad.

Nothing in the papers reveals why Kennedy, who is Catholic, changed his mind in the decision and ended up voting with Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, John Paul Stevens and David Souter.

Mark Chopko, general counsel for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said the details about Kennedy's change of mind in two 1992 cases is the most interesting part of Blackmun's papers.

"Certainly justices are allowed to reconsider their positions as the case develops and as their own thinking is aided by briefs and argument," he said in an e-mail to Catholic News Service. "It shows how close Roe was actually to being reversed. That reversal will have to wait for another day," he added.

Robert Destro, a professor at The Catholic University of America's Columbus School of Law, said Blackmun's papers reveal just how "suggestible" Kennedy is.

He said the notes show that Kennedy "didn't apply the law, but instead considered how it would play out in the newspapers."

Destro also told CNS in a telephone interview that he wasn't surprised by Kennedy's change of mind because in the Casey case in particular, it was "obvious that someone had changed sides."

Blackmun's notes reveal that another case in which Kennedy had a sudden change of mind was Lee vs. Weisman, a 1992 case challenging the constitutionality of clergy-led prayers at graduations.

Kennedy, who was initially going to write the opinion for a 5-4 majority upholding the prayers, wrote to Blackmun after several months saying that his "draft looked quite wrong." Kennedy's revised draft then became the opinion of the 5-4 majority which called the clergy-led prayers unconstitutional.

In both cases where Kennedy's swing vote made a difference, the U.S. Catholic Conference, as it was then called, filed friend-of-the-court briefs supporting what ended up being the minority opinion.

Blackmun's notes also reveal some of the struggle he personally faced with capital punishment decisions.

In a 1967 case in which the court upheld a conviction and death sentence, Blackmun, who was writing the majority opinion, added a concluding paragraph that showed his doubt about the sentence and the death penalty in general, adding that executive clemency might have been more appropriate.

After being criticized for this paragraph by two of the justices, he took it out, but his notes show that he regretted this decision.

"I continue to kick myself for withdrawing my comment about capital punishment," he wrote to then-Chief Justice Warren Burger. "In retrospect, I suppose it was expediency, namely to avoid a hoedown in court. Yet I was right about it and one never should compromise when one is right."