Hughes v. State’s Empirical Analysis
1998
Citation profile
15 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 15 later decisions — most recently March 2018
15 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 Wade v. State · Munsford v. State · Roberts v. Greenway · Crumbley v. State · Mitchell 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 15 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“it is clear that a defendant who pleads guilty in a death penalty case cannot be sentenced to life without parole unless the judge contemporaneously makes a specific finding of a statutory aggravating circumstance beyond a reasonable doubt. Here, because the court did not specify an aggravating circumstance at the time of sentencing, the statutory requirement was not met. (Emphasis omitted.)”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Pierce v. State“To interpret the statute otherwise — so as to permit a judge to find a statutory aggravating circumstance after sentencing a defendant to life without parole — would constitute a denial of due process because the defendant would have been deprived of an opportunity to be heard before the imposition of sentence.”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Pope 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.