Eddings v. Oklahoma’s Empirical Analysis
1982
Citation profile
1,329 federal appellate · 92 district · 2,240 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 4,975 later decisions (328 by the Supreme Court) — most recently September 2025 · most notably Strickland v. Washington (1984), Illinois v. Gates (1983)
1,329 federal appellate · 92 district · 2,240 state decisions — followed in 43 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 · Gault · Furman v. Georgia · Lockett v. Ohio · Picard v. Connor
Cited together with Lockett v. Ohio · Strickland v. Washington · Gregg v. Georgia · Woodson v. North Carolina · Furman 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 4,975 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[j]ust as the State may not by statute preclude the sentencer from considering any mitigating factor, neither may the sentencer refuse to consider, as a matter of law, any relevant mitigating evidence.”
229 later decisions quote this exact passage“any aspect of a defendant's character or record and any of the circumstances of the offense that the defendant proffers as a basis for a sentence less than death.”
108 later decisions quote this exact passage“the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments require that the sentencer, in all but the rarest kind of capital case, not be precluded from considering, as a mitigating factor, any aspect of a defendant's character or record and any of the circumstances of the offense that the defendant proffers as a basis for a sentence less than death.”
24 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrencee.g. Rupe v. Wood · Simmons v. Epps
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.