State v. Mata’s Empirical Analysis
1996
Citation profile
6 federal appellate · 6 district · 41 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 58 later decisions (2 by the Supreme Court) — most recently January 2025 · most notably State v. Anderson (2005), State v. Greene (1998)
6 federal appellate · 6 district · 41 state decisions
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.
Relationships
Relies on Strickland v. Washington · Faretta v. California · Coleman v. Thompson · Gregg v. Georgia · Teague v. Lane
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 58 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The senselessness of the murders, given the inability of the victims to thwart the escape, especially in such an isolated area, and the fact that a young child, less than two years old, who posed no threat to the captors, was indiscriminately shot while in the arms of his mother, compels the conclusion that the actual slayers possessed a shockingly evil state of mind. Less violent alter-natives which would have served their purposes in preventing their detection by the authorities were obviously available. But they chose to slaughter an entire family and [their niece].”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. State v. Lee“Walton therefore squarely forecloses any argument that Arizona's subsection (F)(6) aggravating circumstance, as [previously] construed by the Arizona Supreme Court [in Gretzler ], fails to channel the sentencer's discretion by `clear and objective standards' that provide `specific and detailed guidance,' and that `make rationally reviewable the process for imposing a sentence of death.'”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. State v. Mann“The United States Constitution demands that imposition of a death sentence be based upon some principled distinction.”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. State v. Greene
How this case has been treated — in progress
Whether each later court followed, distinguished, criticized, or overruled this decision. The treatment classification (task #35) runs highest-cited cases first and lights up here as it reaches this one.