State v. Gorwell’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

14 state decisions

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 16 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. ““Although at one time in the jurisprudential history of this country it was widely believed that the constitutional right to a jury trial guaranteed by the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments included the right to insist upon a jury of twelve persons, the Supreme Court has declared that not to be the case. In Williams v. Florida, 399 U.S. 78, 86, 90 , 90 S.Ct. 1893, 1898, 1900 , 26 L.Ed.2d 446 (1970), the Court opined that the fixing of the number of jurors at twelve ‘appears to have been a historical accident,’ and that this feature of the jury had not been immutably codified into the Constitution. The Court was careful to point out, however, that the States were at liberty to require twelve person juries. ‘We do not mean to intimate that legislatures can never have good reasons for concluding that the 12-man jury is preferable to the smaller jury, or that such conclusions— reflected in the provisions of most States and in our federal system — are in any sense unwise. Legislatures may well have their own views about the relative value of the larger and smaller juries, and may conclude that, wholly apart from the jury’s primary function, it is desirable to spread the collective responsibility for the determination of guilt among the larger group. In capital cases, for example, it appears that no State provides for less than 12 jurors — a fact that suggests implicit recognition of the value of the larger body as a means of legitimating society’s decision to impose the death penalt”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. Stokes v. State