Humphries v. Ozmint’s Empirical Analysis
397 F.3d 206 · 2005
Citation profile
18 federal appellate ·
How this case has been cited
Cited by 30 later decisions — most recently August 2021 · most notably United States v. Fields (2007), United States v. Brown (2006)
18 federal appellate ·
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 Strickland v. Washington · Williams v. Taylor · Lockett v. Ohio · Wiggins v. Smith, Warden · Donnelly v. DeChristoforo
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 30 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“In the present case, the solicitor not only suggested that Hall’s life was worth less than his victims’, he developed an arbitrary formula whereby if the jury finds Hall’s life worth less than his victims’, then the jury could reach no other conclusion than that the death penalty is justified. We hold that the solicitor impermissibly compared Hall’s life to the victims’ lives. We find that the solicitor’s comparison (1) was so emotionally inflammatory that it became a material part of the jury’s deliberation process; (2) unquestionably directed the jurors to conduct an arbitrary balancing of worth, which required that Hall be sentenced to death if the jury found Hall’s life was worth less than the lives of his victims; (3) is totally unrelated to the circumstances of the crime; and (4) is distinguishable from traditional impact evidence in that it was not actually offered to show the impact of the crime on the victims or the victims’ family.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the dissent“In our view, the Hall court gave a principled explanation of why the circumstances of Hall were distinguishable from those involved in our case. The Hall court indicated that Hall involved a direct “value” comparison between the defendant and the victim, asking the jury to weigh the relative worth of the defendant and the victim. This comparison, the court concluded, rendered Hall’s trial fundamentally unfair. By contrast, the court concluded that the solicitor in Humphries simply compared the “histories” of the defendant and the victim’s lives “based on the evidence presented,” id., and thus, Humphries’s trial was not fundamentally unfair.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the dissent
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.