Thompson v. Oklahoma’s Empirical Analysis
1988
Citation profile
132 federal appellate · 21 district · 510 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 825 later decisions (36 by the Supreme Court) — most recently November 2024 · most notably Atkins v. Virginia (2002), Penry v. Lynaugh (1989)
132 federal appellate · 21 district · 510 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 · Furman v. Georgia · Lockett v. Ohio · Brown et al. v. Board of Education of Topeka et al. · Brown v. Allen
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 825 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“at the same time [that the teenager] is much more apt to be motivated by mere emotion or peer pressure than is an adult,”
33 later decisions quote this exact passage“[T]he death penalty has been treated differently from all other punishments”
30 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the dissent“evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.”
7 later decisions quote this exact passage
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.