Boyington v. State’s Empirical Analysis
1985
Citation profile
13 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 13 later decisions — most recently October 2013
13 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 · Payton v. New York · Brown v. Illinois · Dunaway v. New York · California State Board of Equalization v. Western Marina Corp.
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 13 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“If you are going to go back there and show leniency, that’s fine. But please have a good reason for it. Because what would you do if this happened to your family? You know, all of you have got families here and you have got kids and you have got a home. How would you feel if your home was firebombed one night and you saw your children on fire? What do you think should happen to a person like Barron Lee Boyington, that does something like that? And it is your opportunity to say, “Barron Lee Boyington, you have no right to do what you did to that Anderson family, and we aren’t going to put up with it.” So please put yourself in that place when you are deciding this. Put yourself in the place of that Anderson family and imagine that was your family that was firebombed in the middle of the night. Imagine that it was your son that has his legs on fire. Imagine that it was your home that was burned out. Would you want mercy shown? Would you want leniency shown? .... And please keep in the forefront of your mind just like it was your family that received the fire bomb and you are in a den at 3:00 a.m. on a hot summer evening. Keep that in the forefront of your mind and just think what you would want to happen in that situation.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passagee.g. Torres v. State · Linder v. State
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.