Moore v. Wyrick’s Empirical Analysis
766 F.2d 1253 · 1985
Citation profile
9 federal appellate · 3 district · 11 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 30 later decisions — most recently September 2025 · most notably Coffman v. Trickey (1989), In Re Baert (1988)
9 federal appellate · 3 district · 11 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
Applies 28 U.S.C. § 2254 (Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996)
Relies on Hamling v. United States · Weaver v. Graham · Sumner v. Mata · Marks v. United States · Bouie v. City of Columbia
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 30 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““[A]n unforeseeable judicial enlargement of a criminal statute, applied retroactively, operates precisely like an ex post facto law, such as Article I, § 10, of the Constitution forbids.... If a state legislature is barred by the Ex Post Facto Clause from passing such a law, it must follow that a state supreme court is barred by the Due Process Clause from achieving precisely the same result by judicial construction. The fundamental principle that “the required criminal law must have existed when the conduct in issue occurred” must apply to bar retroactive criminal prohibitions emanating from courts as well as from legislatures. If a judicial construction of a criminal statute is “unexpected and indefensible by reference to the law which had been expressed prior to the conduct in issue,” it must not be given retroactive effect. When a state court overrules a consistent line of procedural decisions with the retroactive effect of denying a litigant a hearing in a pending case, it therefore deprives him of due process of law “in its primary sense of an opportunity to be heard and to defend [his] substantive right.” When a similarly unforeseeable state court construction of a criminal statute is applied retroactively to subject a person to criminal liability for past conduct, the effect is to deprive him of due process of law in the sense of fair warning that his contemplated conduct constitutes a crime.”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“theory, the defendant or an accomplice must commit the killing in order for a felony-murder statute to be applicable. Whereas, under the”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. State v. Jones
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.