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393 U.S. 997

Maxwell v. Bishop

Supreme Court of the United States

Decided December 16, 1968

Supreme Court of the United States · decided 1968-12-16

Key passage — most relied on by later courts

“"2. Whether Arkansas' practice of permitting the trial jury absolute discretion, uncontrolled by standards or directions of any kind, to impose the death penalty violates the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment? "3. Whether Arkansas' single-verdict procedure, which requires the jury to determine guilt and punishment simultaneously and a defendant to choose between presenting mitigating evidence on the punishment issue or maintaining his privilege against self-incrimination on the guilt issue, violates the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments."”

quoted by 1 later decision, including State v. Sanders

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1968-12-16

How this case has been cited

Cited by 277 later decisions (7 by the Supreme Court) — most recently April 2019 · most notably Engle v. Isaac (1982), National Labor Relations Board v. Gissel Packing Co. (1969)

106 federal appellate · 11 district · 103 state decisions — followed in 33 states

1490196819701980199020002010decided

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.

View the full empirical analysis of this case →

¶1C. A. 8th Cir. Certiorari granted limited to Questions 2 and 3 of the petition which read as follows:

“2. Whether Arkansas’ practice of permitting the trial jury absolute discretion, uncontrolled by standards or directions of any kind, to impose the death penalty violates the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment?
“3. Whether Arkansas’ single-verdict procedure, which requires the jury to determine guilt and punishment simultaneously and a defendant to choose between presenting mitigating evidence on the punishment issue or maintaining his privilege against self-incrimination on *998the guilt issue, violates the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments?”
Jack Greenberg, James M. Nabrit III, Norman C. Amaker, Michael Melts-ner, George Howard, Jr., and Anthony G. Amsterdam for petitioner.Joe Purcell, Attorney General of Arkansas, and Don Langston, Deputy Attorney General, for respondent.

¶2Case set for oral argument immediately following No. 642 [Boykin v. Alabama, ante, p. 820].

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