Davis v. Georgia’s Empirical Analysis
1976
Citation profile
80 federal appellate · 3 district · 350 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 557 later decisions (31 by the Supreme Court) — most recently August 2024 · most notably Wainwright v. Witt (1985), Darden v. Wainwright (1986)
80 federal appellate · 3 district · 350 state decisions — followed in 27 states
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 · Witherspoon v. Illinois · Boulden v. Holman · Maxwell v. Bishop
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 557 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“irrevocably committed, before the trial has begun, to vote against the penalty of death regardless of the facts and circumstances that might emerge in the course of the proceedings,”
17 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. State v. Pinch · Johnson v. State“[A] sentence of death cannot be carried out if the jury that imposed or recommended it was chosen by excluding veniremen for cause simply because they voiced general objections to the death penalty or expressed conscientious or religious scruples against its infliction.”
8 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Smith v. Davis · Clark v. State“any subsequently imposed death penalty cannot stand.”
5 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Smith v. Davis · Crawford 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.