Willett v. State’s Empirical Analysis
1995
Citation profile
63 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 65 later decisions — most recently June 2017 · most notably Echols v. State (1996), State v. Bland (1997)
63 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 Edwards v. Arizona · Michigan v. Jackson · Walton v. Arizona · Skipper v. South Carolina · Angrist v. United States
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 65 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“(a) () One or more aggravating circumstances did exist beyond a reasonable doubt, at the time of the commission of the capital murder. (b) (X) The aggravating circumstances outweigh beyond a reasonable doubt any mitigating circumstances found by the jury to exist. (c) () The aggravating circumstances justify beyond a reasonable doubt a sentence of death.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the dissente.g. Robbins v. State · Jones v. State“(b) (_) The aggravating circumstances outweigh beyond a reasonable doubt any mitigating circumstances found by any juror to exist.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Robbins v. State · Kemp v. State“The General Assembly rewrote this aggravating circumstance in Act 683 of 1991 after this court declared in Wilson v. State, 295 Ark. 682 , 751 S.W.2d 734 (1988), that its statutory predecessor was unconstitutional in violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments to the federal constitution. The 1991 statutory amendment includes language substantially similar, if not identical, to language upheld as constitutional by the United States Supreme Court in Walton v. Arizona, 497 U.S. 639 , 110 S. Ct. 3047 , 111 L. Ed. 2d 511 (1990). Greene, 317 Ark. 350 , 878 S.W.2d 384 . For the reasons stated by the Supreme Court in Walton, our statute is therefore not void on its face.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Echols 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.