McFarland v. Scott’s Empirical Analysis
1994
Citation profile
6 federal appellate · 4 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 18 later decisions (1 by the Supreme Court) — most recently November 2010
6 federal appellate · 4 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
Applies 21 U.S.C. § 848 (§ 408 of the Controlled Substances Act)
Relies on Strickland v. Washington · Miranda v. State of Arizona Vignera · Coleman v. Thompson · McCleskey v. Zant · Taylor v. Louisiana
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 18 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“crisis in trial and state postconviction legal representation for capital defendants”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the dissent“Our system of justice is adversarial and depends for its legitimacy on the fair and adequate representation of all parties at all levels of the judicial process. The trial is the main event in this system, where the prosecution and the defense do battle to reach a presumptively reliable result. When we execute a capital defendant in this country, we rely on the belief that the individual was guilty, and was convicted and sentenced after a fair trial, to justify the imposition of state-sponsored killing. And when this Court curtails federal oversight of state court proceedings, it does so in reliance on the proposition that justice has been done at the trial level. My 24 years of overseeing the imposition of the death penalty from this Court have left me in grave doubt whether this reliance is justified and whether the constitutional requirement of competent legal counsel for capital defendants is being fulfilled.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the dissente.g. Keith v. Mitchell
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.