State v. Mathis’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

9 federal appellate · 58 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 73 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. ““The thesis of Witherspoon is that persons who dislike capital punishment but are nonetheless capable of weighing the penalty issue constitute a segment of the community within the concept that a jury shall be drawn from a cross-section of the community.” 245 A.2d, at 27 .”

   2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Koonce v. State · 238 So. 2d 602 - Barlow v. State

2. ““The issue before us is a narrow one. It does not involve the right of the prosecution to challenge for cause those prospective jurors who state that their reservations about capital punishment would prevent them from making an impartial decision as to the defendant’s guilt. Nor does it involve the State’s assertion of a right to exclude from the jury in a capital case those who say that they could never vote to impose the death penalty or that they would refuse even to consider its imposition in the case before them. For the State of Illinois did not stop there, but authorized the prosecution to exclude as well all who said that they were opposed to capital punishment and all who indicated that they had conscientious scruples against inflicting it. “ * * * “If the State had excluded only those prospective jurors who stated in advance of trial that they would not even consider returning a verdict of death, it could argue that the resulting jury was simply ‘neutral’ with respect to penalty. But when it swept from the jury all who expressed conscientious or religious scruples against capital punishment and all who opposed it in principle, the State crossed the line of neutrality. In its quest for a jury capable of imposing the death penalty, the State produced a jury uncommonly willing to condemn a man to die.””

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. State v. Pace

3. “"That rule is sound enough when the focus is merely upon a defendant’s entitlement to a particular juror... . But when the challenge goes beyond that limited issue and implicates the right to be tried by a jury which is representative of the community, it would be no answer to a systematic exclusion to say that the 12 jurors who decided the case were individually impartial.... This must be so, for otherwise the right to a representative jury, as established in Witherspoon , could not be vindicated.””

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. King v. State