Spinkellink v. Wainwright’s Empirical Analysis
578 F.2d 582 · 1978
Citation profile
113 federal appellate · 3 district · 123 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 376 later decisions (10 by the Supreme Court) — most recently November 2022 · most notably McCleskey v. Kemp (1987), Pulley v. Harris (1984)
113 federal appellate · 3 district · 123 state decisions — followed in 23 states
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 Miranda v. State of Arizona Vignera · Glasser v. United States · Younger v. Harris · Wolff v. McDonnell · Wainwright v. Sykes
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 376 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“What is intended to be included are those capital crimes where the actual commission of the capital felony was accompanied by such additional acts as to set the crime apart from the norm of capital felonies — the conscienceless or pitiless crime which is unnecessarily torturous to the victim.”
17 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence“[i]t indicates only that a death-qualified jury might favor the prosecution and that a nondeath-qualified jury might favor the defendant.”
7 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“"The right under the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments to trial by a jury guarantees to the criminally accused `a fair trial by a panel of impartial, "indifferent" jurors.' Irvin v. Dowd , supra, 366 U.S. at 722 , 81 S.Ct. at 1642 . Accord, e.g., Murphy v. Florida , 421 U.S. 794 , 799 , 95 S.Ct. 2031 , 2036 , 44 L.Ed.2d 589 (1975). But the state also enjoys the right to an impartial jury, Williams v. Wainwright , supra, 427 F.2d at 923, and impartiality requires not only freedom from jury bias against the accused and for the prosecution, but freedom from jury bias for the accused and against the prosecution. Hayes v. Missouri , 120 U.S. 68 , 70-71 , 7 S.Ct. 350 , 351 , 30 L.Ed. 578 (1887). See Comment , 21 Vand.L.Rev. 864, 865 (1968)." Spinkellink v. Wainwright , 578 F.2d 582 , 596 (5th Cir. 1978).”
6 later decisions 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.