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450 U.S. 1024

101 S. Ct. 1730

68 L. Ed. 2d 219

Docket No. 80-924

Shell Oil Company v. Department of Energy

Supreme Court of the United States

March 23, 1981

Supreme Court of the United States · decided 1981-03-23

Key passage — most relied on by later courts

“Pursuant to the Judgment entered by the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit December 17, 1984, Judgment is hereby entered that the writ of habeas corpus is denied but that, determining the case as law and justice require, the death sentence of petitioner heretofore imposed is adjudged invalid under the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, and the execution of the Petitioner under this invalid death sentence is enjoined; and that the judgment is without prejudice to further proceedings by the State for re-determination of the sentence on the conviction, at which proceedings the petitioner is afforded an opportunity to present all evidence relevant to mitigating circumstances or to the aggravating circumstances alleged, including the withheld evidence discussed herein, along with any other evidence relevant to the sentencing proceedings.”

quoted by 1 later decision, including Chaney v. Brown

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1981-03-23

How this case has been cited

Cited by 58 later decisions (2 by the Supreme Court) — most recently March 2018 · most notably State v. Palmer (1986), Brown v. Chaney (1984)

14 federal appellate · 34 state decisions

3201981199020002010decided

Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.

View the full empirical analysis of this case →

On petition for writ of certiorari to the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

The petition for a writ of certiorari is denied.

Justice POWELL, dissenting.

The Energy Information Administration of the Department of Energy (DOE) compels 27 energy-producing companies, including petitioners, to submit data in response to 7,200 individual requests for information about their operations. These data concern virtually all aspects of these companies' finances. Upon request, DOE releases data submitted under this compulsion to other federal departments and agencies, including the offices in the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission charged with enforcing the antitrust laws.

Justice STEWART took no part in the consideration or decision of this petition.

The dissemination of this extraordinary volume of data to those prosecutorial Government agencies raises a serious question, as these agencies thereby may obtain information that statutory and constitutional safeguards would bar them from obtaining directly in antitrust enforcement actions. The likelihood that rights of potential antitrust defendants will be violated increases as DOE demands increasingly more data from companies subject to its regulation and then disseminates the information to prosecutorial agencies. Congress has given DOE an investigative power that appears to be intrusive as well as excessively burdensome in its own right. But that power should not become a blanket discovery authority for the use of the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission without the safeguards provided by law against abuse of legal rights.

¶1

Because of the seriousness of the question whether Congress intended that information obtained by DOE be put to such use, I would grant the petition for certiorari and set the case for plenary consideration.

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