Fairchild v. Norris’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

12 federal appellate · 1 district · 2 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 16 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “Before a defendant can be sentenced to death, our Constitution requires that he be guilty of a certain degree of culpable conduct. In Enmund v. Florida, supra, and Tison v. Arizona, supra, the Supreme Court elaborated on the necessary mental state in the felony-murder context. In Enmund , the Court held that states could not impose the death penalty on an accomplice to a felony murder who “[did] not himself kill, attempt to kill, or intend that a killing take place or that lethal force [would] be employed.” Enmund v. Florida, supra, 458 U.S. at 797 , 102 S.Ct. at 3377 . The defendant in Enmund was the driver of a getaway car whose codefendants had entered a house to commit an armed robbery. Those codefendants shot and killed several people after one of the residents fired on them. Id. at 784 , 102 S.Ct. at 3370. Because Enmund was not present when the shots were fired, and the evidence did not show that he had any intent to kill or use lethal force, the Court held that Enmund’s death sentence was unconstitutional. The court further elaborated on the principle of proportionality in felony-murder sentencing in Tison v. Arizona, supra. In Tison , the Court stressed that two types of cases occur at opposite ends of the felony-murder spectrum. At one end of the spectrum are “minor aetor[s] in an armed robbery, not on the scene, who neither intended to kill nor [were] found to have had any culpable mental state,” while at the other are felony murders “who actually killed, attempted”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. 871 F. Supp. 1182 - Reeves v. Hopkins

2. “major participation in the felony committed, combined with reckless indifference to human life, is sufficient to satisfy the... culpability requirement.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. United States v. Allen