Beck v. Alabama’s Empirical Analysis
1980
Citation profile
908 federal appellate · 74 district · 1,917 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 3,811 later decisions (137 by the Supreme Court) — most recently April 2025 · most notably Strickland v. Washington (1984), Darden v. Wainwright (1986)
908 federal appellate · 74 district · 1,917 state decisions — followed in 46 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 Gregg v. Georgia · Chambers v. Mississippi · Furman v. Georgia · Lockett v. Ohio · Woodson v. North Carolina
Cited together with Strickland v. Washington · Hopper v. Evans · Keeble v. United States · Lockett v. Ohio · Gregg 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 3,811 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“there is a significant constitutional difference between the death penalty and lesser punishments.”
213 later decisions quote this exact passage“In the final analysis the difficulty with the Alabama statute is that it interjects irrelevant considerations into the factfinding process...”
16 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence“need for reliability in the determination that death is the appropriate punishment in a specific case.”
9 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
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.