State v. Terry’s Empirical Analysis
1987
Citation profile
12 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 12 later decisions — most recently February 2018
12 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 Meeks v. Florida · Gates v. State · Childs v. State · Stephens v. Hopper · Cook v. State
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 12 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The statutory aggravating circumstance complained of is found in Code Ann. § 27-2534.1(b)(l), which provides in pertinent part that “[t]he offense of murder, rape, armed robbery, or kidnapping was committed by a person with a prior record of conviction for a capital felony .... ” The appellant argues that at the time he committed the murder of Roy Asbell he did not have a “prior record of conviction for a capital felony.” Although the appellant was convicted of a murder and two armed robberies committed prior to the date that he murdered Roy Asbell, these convictions were not obtained until after the murder of Roy Asbell was committed. This argument raises the question whether, in deciding if the appellant has “a prior record of conviction for a capital felony” the jury should consider his record as of the moment of the crime or as of the time of sentencing. We conclude the latter was intended by the legislature, and at the time of his sentencing Stephens’ jury could correctly find that he had such a record. To conclude otherwise would produce the intolerable result that an offender with no prior record could commit numerous separate murders one after the other before being apprehended, and then, at the trials for those murders could Never receive death under this aggravating circumstance even though convicted of each and every one of the murders.”
1 later decision 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.