Two extraordinary death row opinions—one belatedly issued six weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court granted the inmate a stay of execution—opened new windows Monday into the private, often tense and conflicting deliberations among the justices.

In Price v. Dunn, an Alabama capital case, Justice Clarence Thomas bluntly declared he was writing “to set the record straight” amid a feud involving Justice Stephen Breyer. And in the other case, involving a Texas inmate, Justice Samuel Alito Jr. wrote on Monday to explain why he thought his colleagues’ decision in March to pause the execution was “seriously wrong.”