60 Cal. 2d 631 - People v. Morse’s Empirical Analysis
1964
Citation profile
35 federal appellate · 671 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 728 later decisions (12 by the Supreme Court) — most recently August 2021 · most notably Miranda v. State of Arizona Vignera (1966), Caldwell v. Mississippi (1985)
35 federal appellate · 671 state decisions — followed in 21 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 Williams v. People of State of New York · 47 Cal. 2d 566 - People v. Riser · 55 Cal. 2d 88 - People v. Robillard · 59 Cal. 2d 722 - People v. Modesto · People v. Gorshen
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 728 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“after examination of the entire cause, including the evidence, we are of the opinion that it is reasonably probable that a result more favorable to defendant as to penalty would have been reached in the absence of the error”
6 later decisions quote this exact passagee.g. People v. Varnum · People v. Rosoto“"... questions that no human mind can answer, and it, in substance, transposes the task of the [governor] to the jury. "The questions are unanswerable because they rest upon future events which are unpredictable. The jury's attention may be focused, as it was here, upon whether the [governor] will release the defendant into society at some uncertain date in the future such as `eight, nine, ten years from now.' Based upon what defendant may then be, the jury is asked whether it thinks defendant should at that time be released to society. Premised upon the unknown, the question asks for an answer that cannot be intelligently rendered. The jury is precipitated into a judgment upon the imponderable." People v. Morse, 60 Cal.2d 631 , 36 Cal. Rptr. 201 at 208, 209, 388 P.2d 33 at 40, 41 (1964). [14]”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“If the court had given the Morse instruction in the instant case it would have confused rather than assisted the jury. They had already been informed by both the court and counsel that defendant had been convicted of kidnaping for robbery and had been sentenced to life imprisonment without possibility of parole. We have no difficulty in conceiving their immediate perplexity if they had thereupon been further informed in the suggested language of Morse that the rendering of a sentence of life imprisonment `means that the prisoner may be paroled at some time during his lifetime....' [Citation.] Such additional information would have been completely inconsistent with that initially received that defendant could never be paroled. It would have produced obfuscation, not light.”
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.