Gray v. Lucas, Warden, Et Al.’s Empirical Analysis
1983
Citation profile
127 federal appellate · 24 district · 304 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 554 later decisions (5 by the Supreme Court) — most recently April 2022 · most notably Baze v. Rees (2008), Maritime Electric Co. v. United Jersey Bank (1991)
127 federal appellate · 24 district · 304 state decisions — followed in 32 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
Applies 28 U.S.C. § 2254 (Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996)
Relies on Estelle v. Gamble · Wainwright v. Sykes · Townsend v. Sain · Gregg v. Georgia · Fay v. Noia
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 554 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[W]e are not persuaded that under the present jurisprudential standards the showing made by Gray justifies this intermediate appellate court holding that, as a matter of law or fact, the pain and terror resulting from death by cyanide gas is so different in degree or nature from that resulting from other traditional modes of execution as to implicate the eighth amendment right.”
2 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.