State v. Bell’s Empirical Analysis
1990
Citation profile
78 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 80 later decisions (2 by the Supreme Court) — most recently May 2013 · most notably Deboue v. Louisiana (1990), State v. Council (1999)
78 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 Irvin v. Dowd · Wainwright v. Witt · Donnelly v. DeChristoforo · Caldwell v. Mississippi · Murphy v. Florida
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 80 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“... Debra’s body was discovered with an extra pair of adult female silk bikini underwear on top of her cotton children’s underwear. Although Debra’s body was too decomposed to ascertain whether sexual intercourse or the like had occurred, the existence of the adult underwear on the child was evidence that Bell was impelled to kidnap her for bizarre sexual reasons. Evidence of Bell’s bizarre sexual motivations was properly considered by the jury.”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. State v. Nelson
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.