Arave v. Creech’s Empirical Analysis
1993
Citation profile
144 federal appellate · 41 district · 201 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 543 later decisions (7 by the Supreme Court) — most recently May 2025 · most notably Jones v. United States (1999), Tuilaepa v. California (1994)
144 federal appellate · 41 district · 201 state decisions — followed in 24 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.
Appellate journey
reviewedCreech v. Arave (from Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals)
Relationships
Relies on Gregg v. Georgia · United States v. Frady · United States Postal Service Board of Governors v. Aikens · Woodson v. North Carolina · Zant v. Stephens
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 543 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“If the sentencer fairly could conclude that an aggravating circumstance applies to every defendant eligible for the death penalty, the circumstance is constitutionally infirm.”
10 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence“genuinely narrow the class of persons eligible for the death penalty.”
7 later decisions quote this exact passage“Our precedents make clear that a State's capital sentencing scheme must ... genuinely narrow the class of defendants eligible for the death penalty. When the purpose of a statutory aggravating circumstance is to enable the sentencer to distinguish those who deserve capital punishment from those who do not, the circumstance must provide a principled basis for doing so. If the sentencer fairly could conclude that an aggravating circumstance applies to every defendant eligible for the death penalty, the circumstance is constitutionally infirm.”
6 later decisions 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.