Fleming v. Zant’s Empirical Analysis
1989
Citation profile
12 federal appellate · 87 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 105 later decisions — most recently April 2023 · most notably 31 Cal. 4th 179 - People v. Floyd (2003), Head v. Hill (2003)
12 federal appellate · 87 state decisions — followed in 10 states
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 Winters v. People of State of New York · Smith v. State · Fleming v. State · Coleman v. State · Bowden 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 105 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The legislative enactment reflects a decision by the people of Georgia that the execution of mentally retarded offenders makes no measurable contribution to acceptable goals of punishment. Thus, although there may be no “national consensus” against executing the mentally retarded, this state’s consensus is clear. The “standard of decency” that is relevant to the interpretation of the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment found in the Georgia Constitution is the standard of the people of Georgia, not the national standard. Federal constitutional standards represent the minimum, not the maximum, protection that this state must afford its citizens. Thus, although the rest of the nation might not agree, under the Georgia Constitution, the execution of the mentally retarded constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the dissent“the clearest and most objective evidence of how contemporary society views a particular punishment”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the dissente.g. Bradshaw v. State · Dawson v. State“significantly subaverage general intellectual functioning resulting in or associated with impairments in adaptive behavior.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the dissente.g. Burgess v. State
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.