Shell v. Mississippi’s Empirical Analysis
1990
Citation profile
35 federal appellate · 13 district · 322 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 477 later decisions (11 by the Supreme Court) — most recently March 2023 · most notably Tuilaepa v. California (1994), Espinosa v. Florida (1992)
35 federal appellate · 13 district · 322 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 Leary v. United States · Boyde v. California · Godfrey v. Georgia · Maynard v. Cartwright · Walton v. Arizona
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 477 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[T]he word heinous means extremely wicked or shockingly evil; atrocious means outrageously wicked and vile; and cruel means to inflict a high degree of pain with indifference to, or even enjoyment of the suffering of others.”
18 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence“Obviously, a limiting instruction can be used to give content to a statutory factor that 'is itself too vague to provide any guidance to the sentencer' only if the limiting instruction's own 'definitions are constitutionally sufficient,' that is, only if the limiting instruction itself 'provide[s] some guidance to the sentencer.' " (quoting Walton v. Arizona, 497 U.S. 639 , 654, 110 S.Ct. 3047, 3057, 111 L.Ed.2d 511 (1990))); Deutscher v. Whitley, 884 F.2d 1152 , 1162 (9th Cir.1989) ("The depravity of mind instruction ... fails to meet Godfrey requirements.... The depravity instruction in this case, although it contains more words, is no more capable of channeling discretion than the ... instruction rejected in [Maynard v. Cartwright, 486 U.S. 356 , 108 S.Ct. 1853, 100 L.Ed.2d 372 (1988) ] or the ... instruction in Godfrey.”
7 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence“[a]lthough the trial court in this case used a limiting instruction to define the `especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel' factor, that instruction is not constitutionally sufficient.”
7 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.