State v. Schierman’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

10 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 10 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “[The defendant] would have us review [the comparative disproportionality of his death sentence] as a forensic scientist analyzes fingerprints, looking for a specified number of identity points. Only if one can conclusively determine that each swirl, ridge, and whorl is present in both samples is a match declared. We decline to do this. Crimes, particularly the brutal and extreme ones with which we deal in death penalty cases, are unique and cannot be matched up like so many points on a graph.”

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