595 So. 2d 1323 - Shell v. State’s Empirical Analysis
1992
Citation profile
1 federal appellate · 67 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 79 later decisions — most recently June 2016 · most notably 645 So. 2d 829 - Chase v. State (1994), Evans v. State (1997)
1 federal appellate · 67 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 Maynard v. Cartwright · Clemons v. Mississippi · Satterwhite v. Texas · Shell v. Mississippi · 378 So. 2d 640 - Coleman 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 79 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[o]nly the jury, by unanimous decision, can impose the death penalty; as to aggravating circumstances, this Court only has the authority to determine whether the evidence supports the jury's or judge's finding of a statutory aggravating circumstance. There is no authority for this Court to reweigh remaining aggravating circumstances when it finds one or more to be invalid or improperly defined, nor is there authority for this Court to find evidence to support a proper definition of an aggravating circumstance in order to uphold a death sentence by reweighing. Finding aggravating and mitigating circumstances, weighing them, and ultimately imposing a death sentence are, by statute, left to a properly instructed jury.”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage“ask whether beyond reasonable doubt the result would have been the same had the especially heinous aggravating circumstance been properly defined in the jury instructions; and perhaps on this basis it could have determined that the failure to instruct properly was harmless error.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“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.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage
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.