State v. Plath’s Empirical Analysis
1984
Citation profile
6 federal appellate · 70 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 86 later decisions (4 by the Supreme Court) — most recently March 2022 · most notably Skipper v. South Carolina (1986), Tennard v. Dretke, Director, Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Correctional Institutions Division (2004)
6 federal appellate · 70 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 Witherspoon v. Illinois · Snyder v. Commonwealth of Massachusetts · Barefoot v. Estelle · Zant v. Stephens · Tamotsu Tanaka v. Creditors' Committee 1
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 86 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“A jury needs to know how a given defendant came to commit a given aggravated murder, to include aspects of his background, his character and the setting of the crime itself which may explain or even mitigate the conduct of which he has been found guilty. A jury does not need to know how often he will take a shower or whether or not he will be lonely and withdrawn during his tenure at [prison].”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Bowman v. State“In the case before us, defendants elected to enter the forbidden field of social policy and penology. It is neither surprising nor can it be deemed prejudicial that the State * responded in kind, attempting to show through defendants' own witnesses that life imprisonment was not the total abyss which they portrayed it to be.... The State was entitled to make this response.”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Bowman v. State“It should not be necessary in the near future ... to remind the bench and bar of the strict focus to be maintained in the course of a capital sentencing trial.”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. State v. Burkhart
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.