Thanos v. State’s Empirical Analysis
1993
Citation profile
80 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 80 later decisions — most recently December 2021 · most notably Ware v. State (2000), Abeokuto v. State (2006)
80 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 Dusky v. United States · Pate v. Robinson · Drope v. Missouri · Rock v. Arkansas · Booth v. Maryland
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.
“"(f) Incompetent to stand trial. "Incompetent to stand trial” means not able: "(1) to understand the nature or object of the proceeding; or "(2) to assist in one's defense.””
5 later decisions quote this exact passagee.g. Thanos v. State · Gregg v. State““The record gives no hint that counsel’s questionable advice influenced Thanos’s decision not to testify. Before the trial began, Thanos stated on the record that he had no intention to testify. He confirmed to the court at that point that he had discussed with counsel his right to testify and his desire to forego that right. Defense counsel subsequently indicated no fewer than three times that the defense would present no evidence. It was only at the conclusion of the State’s case that defense counsel made the ambiguous statement about prior convictions to Thanos in explaining his right to testify; but nothing in Thanos’s responses suggests that counsel’s statement caused him to change his mind about testifying, for the record clearly reflects that he had already decided not to do so.””
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“None of Thanos’s four expert witnesses at the sentencing proceeding ever suggested that he was incompetent to stand trial. While Thanos did make some peculiar remarks to the trial judge, his words on the whole were very lucid. He appeared to grasp all of his rights as they arose throughout the proceedings. He explained very clearly why he preferred conditions in the Super Max facility in Baltimore to those of the St. Mary’s County Detention Center[, the reason he offered for preferring a court trial to a jury trial]. And he understood and insightfully articulated his tendency to become disruptive under stress, which reasonably justified his initial desire to absent himself from the proceedings.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passagee.g. Abeokuto v. State · Gregg 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.