Billy Glen Biles v. John C. Watkins’s Empirical Analysis
1979
Citation profile
47 federal appellate · 19 district · 5 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 138 later decisions (3 by the Supreme Court) — most recently July 2010 · most notably Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals Inc. v. Thompson Ex Rel. Thompson (1986), Atlantic Richfield Company v. United States Department of Energy (1984)
47 federal appellate · 19 district · 5 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 Stromberg v. People of State of California · Williams v. State of North Carolina · Cole v. State of Arkansas · Parham v. J. L. · Presnell v. Georgia
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 138 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Although overturning petitioner's conviction for capital murder, the Mississippi Supreme Court, finding evidence of the necessary intent to kill, found petitioner guilty of simple murder and to this extent affirmed the conviction. Petitioner, however, was not tried by the jury for simple murder, and the judgment of the Mississippi court would appear infirm under Cole v. Arkansas, 333 U.S. 196, 201 , 68 S.Ct. 514, 517 , 92 L.Ed. 644 (1948), where the Court held that `[i]t is as much a violation of due process to send an accused to prison following conviction of a charge on which he was never tried as it would be to convict him upon a charge that was never made.' Further, the right to a jury trial is rendered nugatory where an appellate court overturns the verdict on the only offense found by the jury to have been committed and imposes a conviction for an offense that includes an essential element not necessarily found by the jury.”
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.