Smulls v. Roper’s Empirical Analysis
535 F.3d 853 · 2008
Citation profile
22 federal appellate · 7 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 37 later decisions — most recently July 2025 · most notably United States v. Dinkins (2012), United States v. Rodriguez (2009)
22 federal appellate · 7 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 28 U.S.C. § 2254 (Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996)
Relies on Miller-El v. Cockrell Director Texas Department of Criminal Justice Institutional Division · Batson v. Kentucky · Williams v. Taylor · Village of Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Development Corp. · Wainwright v. Witt
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 37 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The trial court first determines whether the defendant has made a prima facie showing that a prosecutor’s peremptory strike was based on race. If the defendant satisfies the first step, the burden then shifts to the prosecutor to present a race-neutral explanation for striking the juror. The prosecutor’s stated reason need not be persuasive, or even plausible[,] as long as it is not inherently discriminatory. The burden then shifts back to the defendant at the third step to shoulder his ultimate burden of establishing purposeful discrimination. The final step involves evaluating the persuasiveness of the justification proffered by the prosecutor.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the concurrence“The nature of a peremptory strike, which, by definition means “[n]ot requiring any shown cause; arbitrary,” BLACK’S LAW DICTIONARY 1157 (7th ed. 1999), allows both the prosecutor and the defense counsel to remove a potential juror from the panel based entirely on his or her instinct or gut feeling that an individual would not be a favorable juror.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the concurrencee.g. Elder v. Berghuis“A trial court's ruling on a Batson challenge is itself a factual determination, and we have repeatedly upheld rulings made without additional reasoning.”
1 later decision 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.