Stebbing v. Maryland’s Empirical Analysis
1984
Citation profile
3 federal appellate · 2 district · 128 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 158 later decisions (17 by the Supreme Court) — most recently June 2006 · most notably Walton v. Arizona (1990), Brooke Group Ltd. v. Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp. (1993)
3 federal appellate · 2 district · 128 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 · Furman v. Georgia · Lockett v. Ohio · Eddings v. Oklahoma · Cryts v. French
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 158 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“It is our conclusion that the appropriate standard to be followed by the sentencing authority — judge or jury — in a capital case is the following: “After considering the totality of the aggravating and mitigating circumstances, you must be persuaded beyond a reasonable doubt that total aggravation outweighs total mitigation, and you must further be persuaded, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the imposition of the death penalty is justified and appropriate in the circumstances.” “These standards require that the sentencing body compare the totality of the mitigating against the totality of the aggravating factors. Not in terms of the relative numbers of the aggravating and the mitigating factors, but in terms of their respective substantiality and persuasiveness. Basically, what the sentencing authority must decide is how compelling or persuasive the totality of the mitigating factors are when compared against the totality of the aggravating factors. The sentencing body, in making the judgment that aggravating factors 'outweigh,’ or are more compelling than, the mitigating factors, must have no reasonable doubt as to that conclusion, and as to the additional conclusion that the death penalty is justified and appropriate after considering all the circumstances.””
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the concurrencee.g. Evans v. State“view of [his] role in the capital sentencing procedure that was fundamentally incompatible with the Eighth Amendment's heightened 'need for reliability in the determination that death is the appropriate punishment in a specific case.'”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the dissente.g. Adamson v. Ricketts“Based on the evidence, we unanimously find that it has been proven by A PREPONDERANCE OF THE EVIDENCE that the mitigating circumstances marked 'yes' in Section II outweigh the aggravating circumstances marked 'yes' in Section I.”
1 later decision 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.