40 Cal. 3d 512 - People v. Brown’s Empirical Analysis
1985
Citation profile
13 federal appellate · 218 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 265 later decisions (10 by the Supreme Court) — most recently August 2021 · most notably Boyde v. California (1990), California v. Brown (1987)
13 federal appellate · 218 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 Chapman v. State of California · Gregg v. Georgia · Chambers v. Mississippi · Lockett v. Ohio · Caldwell v. Mississippi
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 265 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“`weighing' ... connotes a mental balancing process, but certainly not one which calls for a mere mechanical counting of factors ... or the arbitrary assignment of `weights' to any of them.”
16 later decisions quote this exact passage“at this stage impose death if it finds that the aggravating circumstances outweigh the mitigating ones,”
9 later decisions quote this exact passage“'The weighing of aggravating and mitigating circumstances does not mean a mere mechanical weighing of factors on each side of an imaginary scale, or the arbitrary assignment of weights to any of them. You are free to assign whatever moral or sympathetic value you deem appropriate to each and all of the various factors you are permitted to consider. In weighing the various circumstances you simply determine under the relevant evidence which penalty is justified and appropriate by considering the totality of the aggravating circumstances with the totality of the mitigating circumstances. To return a judgment of death, each of you must be persuaded that the aggravating evidence [circumstances] is so substantial in comparison with the mitigating circumstances that it warrants death instead of life without parole.' " 40 Cal.3d, at 545, n. 19, 230 Cal.Rptr., at 853, n. 19, 726 P.2d, at 535, n. 19. 4 In other contexts, we have held that a defendant cannot establish a constitutional violation simply by demonstrating that an alleged trial-related error could or might have affected the jury. To establish that ineffective assistance of counsel violates the Sixth Amendment, for example, a defendant must show a "reasonable probability that, but for counsel's unprofessional errors, the result of the proceeding would have been different.”
6 later decisions quote this exact passage
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.