Witt v. State’s Empirical Analysis
1980
Citation profile
4 federal appellate · 254 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 275 later decisions (2 by the Supreme Court) — most recently April 2024 · most notably Wainwright v. Witt (1985), 457 So. 2d 481 - State v. Neil (1984)
4 federal appellate · 254 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
Applies 28 U.S.C. § 2255 (Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996)
Relies on Johnson v. Zerbst · Gideon v. Wainwright · Mapp v. Ohio · Stovall v. Denno · Lockett v. Ohio
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 275 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“In contrast to these jurisprudential upheavals are evolutionary refinements in the criminal law, affording new or different standards for the admissibility of evidence, for procedural fairness, for proportionality review of capital cases, and for other like matters. Emergent rights in these categories, or the retraction of former rights of this genre, do not compel an abridgement of the finality of judgments. To allow them that impact would, we are convinced, destroy the stability of the law, render punishments uncertain and therefore ineffectual, and burden the judicial machinery of our state, fiscally and intellectually, beyond any tolerable limit.”
50 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the dissent“(a) the purpose to be served by the new rule; (b) the extent of reliance on the old rule; and (c) the effect on the administration of justice of a retroactive application of the new rule.”
13 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence“difficult to justify depriving a person of his liberty or his life, under process no longer considered acceptable and no longer applied to indistinguishable cases.”
12 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Hughes v. State · Bunkley 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.