Williams v. Warden’s Empirical Analysis
1991
Citation profile
5 federal appellate · 94 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 99 later decisions — most recently March 2011 · most notably Lozada v. Warden, State Prison (1992), Bergeron v. Mackler (1993)
5 federal appellate · 94 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 · Darden v. Wainwright · Michel v. State of Louisiana Poret · Burger v. Kemp · In re Disbarment of Adelman
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 99 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[j]udicial scrutiny of counsel's performance must be highly deferential. It is all too tempting for a defendant to second guess counsel's assistance after conviction or adverse sentence, and it is all too easy for a court, examining counsel's defense after it has proved unsuccessful, to conclude that a particular act or omission of counsel was unreasonable. . . . A fair assessment of attorney performance requires that every effort be made to eliminate the distorting effects of hindsight, to reconstruct the circumstances of counsel's challenged conduct, and to evaluate the conduct from counsel's perspective at the time. Because of the difficulties inherent in making the evaluation, a court must indulge a strong presumption that counsel's conduct falls within the wide range of reasonable professional assistance; that is, the defendant must overcome the presumption that, under the circumstances, the challenged action might be considered sound trial strategy.”
9 later decisions quote this exact passage“[A] court deciding an actual ineffectiveness claim must judge the reasonableness of counsel's challenged conduct on the facts of the particular case, viewed as of the time of counsel's conduct.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“[t]he reasonableness of an attorney's investigative decisions often depends critically on the information supplied by his client.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage
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.