State v. Addison’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

11 state decisions

Most-quoted passages

The sentences later courts lift from this opinion, ranked by how many decisions quote each — the parts of the opinion doing the work. These counts are smaller than the citation total above because most of the 11 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. ““serves as a check against the random or arbitrary imposition of the death penalty. In particular, the proportionality review substantially eliminates the possibility that a person will be sentenced to die by the action of an aberrant jury. If a time comes when juries generally do not impose the death sentence in a certain kind of murder case, the appellate review procedures assure that no defendant convicted under such circumstances will suffer a sentence of death.””

   2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
   e.g. State of New Hampshire v. Michael Addison (Capital Murder – Proportionality Review) · Fry v. Lopez

2. “the appellate task under [comparative] proportionality review was not to determine whether the capital case before it in some way was, on a scale of moral blameworthiness, roughly equivalent to all other capital cases and, absent such rough equivalence, to reverse the sentence. Nor was that review considered to require that the capital case before the court must affirmatively be shown, on such a scale, to have been quantitatively different from all other cases in which the death penalty was not imposed and, absent such an affirmative showing, to reverse the sentence. In the Supreme Court's view, rather, the appellate inquiry under proportionality review was whether the death penalty imposed in a particular case was aberrational, within the particular jurisdiction involved, with respect to similar cases.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
   e.g. Fry v. Lopez

3. “(a) The defendant: (1) purposely killed the victim; (2) purposely inflicted serious bodily injury which resulted in the death of the victim; (3) purposely engaged in conduct which: (A) the defendant knew would create a grave risk of death to a person, other than one of the participants in the offense; and (B) resulted in the death of the victim.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
   e.g. State of New Hampshire v. Michael Addison (Capital Murder – Proportionality Review)