Washington v. Strickland’s Empirical Analysis
673 F.2d 879 · 1982
Citation profile
18 federal appellate · 7 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 43 later decisions (1 by the Supreme Court) — most recently November 2010 · most notably Strickland v. Washington (1984), Washington v. Strickland (1982)
18 federal appellate · 7 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 Chapman v. State of California · Glasser v. United States · Gideon v. Wainwright · Gregg v. Georgia · Cuyler v. Sullivan
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 43 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[T]here are strong policy reasons for prohibiting the use of this sort of testimony. No doubt most judges will remember the capital cases over which they have presided more clearly than cases charging lesser offenses. Yet it is unrealistic to expect that a trial judge can, using nothing more than a cold record and his own recollections, completely and accurately reconstruct his thought processes in one particular case that he decided over four years earlier. In addition to these mental gymnastics, a judge would have to push aside his natural human tendencies to justify his past actions with post hoe rationalizations. And it blinks reality to assume that a trial judge can also describe with any degree of certainty the process by which any additional information would have factored into his mental calculus had it been presented at the time of sentencing. Our society demands much of trial judges in this day and time; it cannot, however, fairly demand that they be omniscient.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority“Mr. Tunkey should have made an independent investigation of factors relevant to mitigation, and that such investigation would have produced generally favorable information from family, friends, former employers, and medical experts.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority“[t]he law of our circuit is as yet unclear as to the precise degree of prejudice that a defendant must demonstrate before he is entitled to habeas corpus relief on grounds that he received ineffective assistance of counsel ....”
1 later decision 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.