Williams v. Lynaugh, Director, Texas Department of Corrections’s Empirical Analysis
1987
Citation profile
164 federal appellate · 16 district · 84 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 500 later decisions (8 by the Supreme Court) — most recently June 2022 · most notably Wood v. Ostrander (1989), Pansy v. Borough of Stroudsburg (1994)
164 federal appellate · 16 district · 84 state decisions — followed in 14 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 · Williams v. People of State of New York · Ake v. Oklahoma · Eddings v. Oklahoma · 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 500 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“there is a corresponding difference in the need for reliability in the determination that death is an appropriate punishment.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the dissente.g. Paxton v. State · Housel v. Head“[T]he admission of unadjudicated offenses in the sentencing phase of a capital trial does not violate the eighth and fourteenth amendments.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the dissente.g. Hatch v. Oklahoma
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.