Hicks v. Oklahoma’s Empirical Analysis
1980
Citation profile
340 federal appellate · 19 district · 283 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 995 later decisions (23 by the Supreme Court) — most recently May 2024 · most notably Boyde v. California (1990), Ross v. Oklahoma (1988)
340 federal appellate · 19 district · 283 state decisions — followed in 20 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 Morrissey v. Brewer · Wolff v. McDonnell · Greenholtz v. Inmates of Nebraska Penal and Correctional Complex · Vitek v. Jones · Mempa v. Rhay
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 995 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“It is argued that all that is involved in this case is the denial of a procedural right of exclusively state concern. Where, however, a State has provided for the imposition of criminal punishment in the discretion of the trial jury, it is not correct to say that the defendant’s interest in the exercise of that discretion is merely a matter of state procedural law. The defendant in such a case has a substantial and legitimate expectation that he will be deprived of his liberty only to the extent determined by the jury in the exercise of its statutory discretion, and that liberty interest is one that the Fourteenth Amendment preserves against arbitrary deprivation by the State. In this case Oklahoma denied the petitioner the jury sentence to which he was entitled under state law, simply on the frail conjecture that a jury might have imposed a sentence equally as harsh as that mandated by the invalid habitual offender provision. Such an arbitrary disregard of the petitioner’s right to liberty is a denial of due process of law.”
37 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“reasoning that the petitioner was not prejudiced by the impact of the invalid statute, since his sentence was within the range of punishment that could have been imposed in any event.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“purport to cure the deprivation by itself reconsidering the appropriateness”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority
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.