State v. Combs’s Empirical Analysis
1991
Citation profile
10 federal appellate · 257 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 271 later decisions — most recently May 2025 · most notably State v. Smith (1997), State v. Carter (1995)
10 federal appellate · 257 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 Strickland v. Washington · Griffin v. California · Doyle v. Ohio · State v. Bradley · Wainwright v. Witt
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 271 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[t]he admission or exclusion of relevant evidence rests within the sound discretion of the trial court and its decision regarding that evidence cannot be reversed absent an abuse of that discretion.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“a reasonable probability that, were it not for counsel's errors, the result of the trial would have been different.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrencee.g. State v. Lundgren · State v. Richey“Can you imagine the terror of that? A gun right to your head, was she [Joan] thinking of her husband, who was going to take care of him? Was she thinking about her childhood? Was she thinking about her daughter take me but spare Peggy? That’s the aggravating circumstance, what she went through. Or maybe she started to pray, we don’t know. He won’t tell us. ... What did she [Peggy] think when this now hot steal [sic] pressed against the back of her head, she knew she too wasn’t going to be given any mercy. What went through her mind, what was she thinking? Was she thinking of little Joey, who’s going to take care of him, grandma is gone, I’m going to be gone, who’s going to raise my little boy. And then came the pull of that second trigger, and she’s gone. That’s the aggravating circumstance, that’s what you put in your one hand and even if you do find some mitigation and all that that the defendant told you, weigh that. ... What weighs more, these two totally good lives or the defendant’s life in the fast lane?”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Combs v. Coyle
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.