Emergency governance in blockchain systems involves swiftly addressing critical operational/security issues with participants’ agreement. However, this is challenging. Reasons are twofold: (i) leader-based protocols often degrade performance under leader crashes or malicious behavior, jeopardizing time-critical governance decisions; (ii) existing BFT solutions rarely pinpoint faulty nodes, allowing malicious nodes to disrupt consensus unpunished. In this paper, we present EquinoxBFT, a leaderless synchronous BFT protocol that ensures stability and accountability in an emergency. EquinoxBFT avoids over-reliance on a single leader by letting every node propose its proposal with a verifiable random priority. Honest nodes choose the proposal with the highest priority that they observe to advance the protocol, ensuring that crash failures do not cause the protocol to stall. Meanwhile, if a highest-priority proposal fails to finalize, our protocol identifies the misbehaving node for penalization. Evaluations show that EquinoxBFT achieves robust throughput with fixed communication rounds, at comparable throughput levels, EquinoxBFT can tolerate up to 30 % more faulty nodes than HotStuff (PODC’19).