State v. Ryan’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

2 district · 58 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 67 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “The U.S. Supreme Court has held the words “heinous,” “atrocious,” and “cruel” to be unconstitutionally vague in an Oklahoma sentencing statute which is very comparable to Nebraska’s § 29-2523(l)(d). See Maynard v. Cartwright, 486 U.S. 356 , 108 S. Ct. 1853 , 100 L. Ed. 2d 372 (1988). See, also, Godfrey v. Georgia, 446 U.S. 420, 428 , 100 S. Ct. 1759 , 64 L. Ed. 2d 398 (1980) (holding Georgia’s “ ‘outrageously or wantonly vile, horrible or inhuman’ ” aggravating circumstance to be unconstitutional because the Georgia court failed to limit the statute in such a way as to provide a principled distinction between death penalty and non-death-penalty cases). In both Maynard and Godfrey , the defendant was sentenced to death by a jury which had been instructed in only the bare language of the sentencing statute or in language which was similarly vague. Likewise, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit has found the text of Nebraska’s aggravating circumstance (l)(d), standing alone, to be constitutionally insufficient. Moore v. Clarke, 904 F.2d 1226 (8th Cir. 1990), reh’g denied 951 F.2d 895 (8th Cir. 1991), cert. denied 504 U.S. 930 , 112 S. Ct. 1995 , 118 L. Ed. 2d 591 (1992). However, “a state supreme court may salvage a facially-vague statute by construing it to provide the sentencing body with objective criteria for applying the statute.” Moore v. Clarke, 904 F.2d at 1229 . The Eighth Circuit, in several recent cases, has looked beyond the text of § 29-2523(1)(d) to det”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
   e.g. State v. Gales

2. “I think the reason that the Court has provided this instruction the way it has is the Court previously found that sexual abuse was the reason they found that the murder was especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel. The problem that I have with that is the instruction appears that if they just find that Latara Chandler was sexually abused, that that alone makes it especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel, and I would argue to this Court that based on the findings of the case law in the State of Nebraska, on the basis of that, that there is more than just the sexual assault. It’s the facts and circumstances leading up and during and after the sexual assault that occurred that goes into that, and by this instruction, the jury isn’t going to be instructed to take that into account to determine if the sexual abuse is, in fact, heinous, atrocious, and cruel.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
   e.g. State v. Gales