Ex Parte Hays’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

34 state decisions

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 36 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “'The right to the effective assistance of counsel is thus the right of the accused to require the prosecution's case to survive the crucible of meaningful adversarial testing. When a true adversarial criminal trial has been conducted — even if defense counsel may have made demonstrable errors — the kind of testing envisioned by the Sixth Amendment has occurred.'”

   3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. 711 So. 2d 1101 - Dallas v. State · 545 So. 2d 129 - Fortenberry v. State

2. “judge, and not the jury, is the final sentencing authority in criminal proceedings.”

   3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Jones v. State · Bryant v. State

3. ““The trial court then explained its weighing of the aggravating circumstances and the mitigating circumstances and proceeded to override the jury’s recommendation, stating: “ ‘The Court has carefully, and at length, reviewed the aggravating circumstances and the statutory and non-statutory mitigating circumstances and has given serious consideration to the unanimous recommendation of the jury for life [imprisonment] without parole and the evidence received by the jury at the hearing. “ ‘The other perpetrator in this crime, John Ronald Daniels, was convicted of the capital offense of first degree murder of the same two people and [was] sentenced to death. This Court is charged with the duty to insure that the death penalty is not imposed in a freakish, arbitrary, wanton or capricious manner. That is the reason this Court has the authority to reject a jury’s recommendation of death and impose life [imprisonment] without parole and conversely the authority to reject a jury’s recommendation of life without parole and impose death, if by doing either the Court prevents such prohibited imposition. “ ‘In light of the peculiar circumstances in this case with regard to this defendant, this Court is of the opinion that the acceptance of the jury’s recommendation would be wrong. “ ‘For our judicial system to say, under the circumstances of this case, that the hit man should be sentenced to death but that the hirer, the planner, the cold avenger and the eo-exe-cutioner should be sentence”

   2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Ferguson v. State · 632 So. 2d 577 - Ex Parte Giles