Hughes v. State’s Empirical Analysis
1978
Citation profile
36 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 41 later decisions (3 by the Supreme Court) — most recently October 1999 · most notably Adams v. Texas (1980), Billy George Hughes v. Gary L. Johnson, Director, Texas Department of Criminal Justice,institutional Division (1999)
36 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
Relies on Witherspoon v. Illinois · Davis v. Georgia · Alejandro v. State · Moore v. Texas · Martin v. State
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 41 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“"We must be mindful that where we only have a cold record before us the trial judge in passing on the answers of the `equivocating venireman' has the opportunity to observe the tone of voice and demeanor of the prospective juror in determining the precise meaning intended."”
4 later decisions quote this exact passagee.g. Mead v. State · Smith v. State““Based on our own examination of the record, we have concluded that § 12.31(b) was applied in this case to exclude prospective jurors on grounds impermissible under Witherspoon and related cases. As employed here, the touchstone of the inquiry under § 12.31(b) was not whether putative jurors could and would follow their instructions and answer the posited questions in the affirmative if they honestly believed the evidence warranted it beyond reasonable doubt. Rather, the touchstone was whether the fact that the imposition of the death penalty would follow automatically from affirmative answers to the question would have any effect at all on the jurors’ performance of their duties. Such a test could, and did, exclude jurors who stated that they would be ‘affected’ by the possibility of the death penalty, but who apparently meant only that the potentially lethal consequences of their decision would invest their deliberations with greater seriousness and gravity or would involve them emotionally. Others were excluded only because they were unable positively to state whether or not their deliberations would in any way be ‘affected.’ But neither nervousness, emotional involvement, nor inability to deny or confirm any effect whatsoever is equivalent to an unwillingness or an inability on the part of the jurors to follow the court’s instructions and obey their oaths, regardless of their feelings about the death penalty. The grounds for excluding these jurors were consequently insuff”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Cuevas v. State“"We cannot believe that Witherspoon v. Illinois, supra, requires certain formal answers and none other. We surely feel the test of Witherspoon is 'not to be applied with hypertechnical and archaic approach of a nineteenth pleading book, but with realism and rationality.'" Ibid at 383, (quoting from Ashe v. Swenson, 397 U.S. 436 , 90 S.Ct. 1189 , 25 L.Ed.2d 469 .)"”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Mead v. State
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.