Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Sullivan v. Ashe’s Empirical Analysis
302 U.S. 51 · 1937
Citation profile
115 federal appellate · 18 district · 220 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 460 later decisions (57 by the Supreme Court) — most recently June 2021 · most notably Gregg v. Georgia (1976), Witherspoon v. Illinois (1968)
115 federal appellate · 18 district · 220 state decisions — followed in 35 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 James Graham v. State of West Virginia · John McDonald v. Commonwealth of Massachusetts · Moore v. State of Missouri · Howard v. Fleming
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 460 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“For the determination of sentences, justice generally requires consideration of more than the particular acts by which the crime was committed and that there be taken into account the circumstances of the offense together with the character and propensities of the offender. His past may be taken to indicate his present purposes and tendencies and significantly to suggest the period of restraint and the kind of discipline that ought to be imposed upon him.”
29 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“Save as limited by constitutional provisions safeguarding individual rights, a State may choose means to protect itself and its people against criminal violation of its laws. The comparative gravity of criminal offenses and whether their consequences are more or less injurious are matters for its determination.”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“[T]he law has long recognized a relation between punishment for escape and the offense for which the prisoner was held at the time of the escape, and the courts have approved statutes which provide for increasingly severe punishments for escape by those inmates serving sentences for more grievous crimes.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Webb v. State · People v. Young
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.