Justus v. Florida’s Empirical Analysis
1984
Citation profile
86 federal appellate · 12 district · 118 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 280 later decisions (2 by the Supreme Court) — most recently November 2012 · most notably Kramer v. Time Warner Inc. (1991), Schreiber v. Burlington Northern, Inc. (1985)
86 federal appellate · 12 district · 118 state decisions
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 · Weaver v. Graham · Tamotsu Tanaka v. Creditors' Committee 1 · Sireci v. Florida
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 280 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The State’s sole argument is that the application of this new aggravating factor had no detrimental effect on petitioner, and therefore was not onerous under Weaver . The State’s view is that, since premeditation was already an element of first-degree murder, the retroactive application of Florida’s new aggravating factor placed no additional burden on petitioner. The State’s position is simply untenable. A Florida Circuit Judge relied upon Florida’s new aggravating factor to sentence petitioner to death. Before 1979, the Florida death penalty statute contained no aggravating factor analogous to the one added by 1979 Fla.Laws 353.... The application of the new aggravating factor made it easier for the Florida judge to sentence petitioner to death, and for that reason alone was more onerous for petitioner than the sentencing procedure in place at the date of his offense.... More importantly, defending an aggravating factor by reference to elements of the underlying offense is inconsistent with this Court’s prior death penalty decisions. The sole purpose of requiring a sentencing authority to balance aggravating factors against mitigating circumstances is to force the sen-tencer to look beyond the offense to determine whether capital punishment is warranted given the totality of the circumstances surrounding the crime. By amending its death penalty statute, Florida changed the ground rules for judging the totality of the circumstances. This change most definitely prejudiced pet”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the dissent
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.