Spaziano v. Florida’s Empirical Analysis
1984
Citation profile
453 federal appellate · 51 district · 815 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 1,685 later decisions (133 by the Supreme Court) — most recently August 2024 · most notably Almendarez-Torres v. United States (1998), Ring v. Arizona (2002)
453 federal appellate · 51 district · 815 state decisions — followed in 44 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 Board of Regents of State Colleges v. Roth · Estelle v. Gamble · Gregg v. Georgia · Witherspoon v. Illinois · Furman v. Georgia
Cited together with Gregg v. Georgia · Strickland v. Washington · Beck v. Alabama · Lockett v. Ohio · 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 1,685 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“If a State has determined that death should be an available penalty for certain crimes, then it must administer that penalty in a way that can rationally distinguish between those individuals for whom death is an appropriate sanction and those for whom it is not.”
60 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“[w]here no lesser included offense exists, a lesser included offense instruction detracts from, rather than enhances, the rationality of the process. Beck does not require that result.”
52 later decisions quote this exact passage““[W]e require that a lesser included offense instruction be given when warranted on account of the danger that, absent such an instruction, a jury may erroneously convict a criminal defendant of the principal offense charged, despite the prosecution’s inability to prove an element of that offense, when the jury is convinced that the defendant’s conduct was criminal.””
13 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.