California v. Ramos’s Empirical Analysis
1983
Citation profile
315 federal appellate · 25 district · 815 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 1,559 later decisions (106 by the Supreme Court) — most recently February 2025 · most notably Darden v. Wainwright (1986), Michigan v. Long (1983)
315 federal appellate · 25 district · 815 state decisions — followed in 37 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 · Witherspoon v. Illinois · Furman v. Georgia · Lockett v. Ohio · Solem v. Helm
Cited together with Gregg v. Georgia · Zant v. Stephens · Caldwell v. Mississippi · Lockett v. Ohio · Woodson v. North Carolina
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 1,559 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“the qualitative difference of death from all other punishments requires a correspondingly greater degree of scrutiny of the capital sentencing determination,”
37 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Turner v. Murray · Smith v. Murray“[W]e believe that in capital cases the fundamental respect for humanity underlying the Eighth Amendment requires consideration of the character and record of the individual offender and the circumstances of the particular offense as a constitutionally indispensable part of the process of inflicting the penalty of death. This conclusion rests squarely on the predicate that the penalty of death is qualitatively different from a sentence of imprisonment, however long.... Because of that qualitative difference, there is a corresponding difference in the need for reliability in the determination that death is the appropriate punishment in a specific case.”
34 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence“Once the jury finds that the defendant falls within the legislatively defined category of persons eligible for the death penalty,”
23 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.