East v. Scott’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

38 federal appellate · 2 district · 2 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 75 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “While the district court generally has discretion to grant or deny discovery requests under Rule 6 [of the Rules Governing Habeas Corpus Cases under Section 2254], a court's blanket denial of discovery is an abuse of discretion if discovery is `indispensable to a fair, rounded, development of the material facts.'”

   3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Wiwa v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co. · Toney v. Gammon

2. “We believe that what Pemy represents is a set of atypical circumstances of a kind that, quite understandably, neither the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals nor the Supreme Court in Jurek had in mind, namely circumstances where the defense's mitigating evidence would have either no substantial relevance or only adverse relevance to the second special issue. Typically, evidence of good character, or of transitory conditions such as youth or being under some particular emotional burden at the time, will tend to indicate that the crime in question is not truly representative of what the defendant’s normal behavior is or may become over time, and that the defendant may be reha-bilitatable so as not to be a continuing threat to society. The core of Jurek — which we cannot conclude has been abandoned— is that the mitigating force of this kind of evidence is adequately accounted for by the second special issue. But in Penry the Court was faced for the first time with a wholly different type of mitigating evidence. Not evidence of good character, but of bad character; not evidence of potential for rehabilitation, but of its absence; not evidence of a transitory condition, but of a permanent one; but nonetheless evidence which was strongly mitigating because these characteristics were due to the uniquely severe permanent handicaps with which the defendant was burdened through no fault of his own, mental retardation, organic brain damage and an abused childhood. There was no way this type”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Robertson v. Cockrell

3. “The opportunity for an evidentiary hearing in a federal habeas corpus proceeding is mandatory only where there is a factual dispute which, if resolved in the petitioner's favor, would entitle the petitioner to relief and the petitioner has not received a full and fair evidentiary hearing in state court.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Thomas v. Taylor