State v. McGuire’s Empirical Analysis
1997
Citation profile
32 federal appellate · 373 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 421 later decisions — most recently December 2025 · most notably State v. Madrigal (2000), State v. Treesh (2001)
32 federal appellate · 373 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 Jackson v. Virginia · Miranda v. State of Arizona Vignera · State v. Jenks · Chambers v. Mississippi · State v. Bradley
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 421 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Our system requires that the prosecution prove all elements of a crime beyond a reasonable doubt. Therefore, it is illogical to find that the defendant is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, yet then doubt the certainty of the guilty verdict by recommending mercy in case a mistake has occurred. Residual doubt casts a shadow over the reliability and credibility of our legal system in that it allows the jury to second-guess its verdict of guilt in the separate penalty phase of a murder trial.... Residual doubt is not an acceptable mitigating factor under R.C. 2929.04(B), since it is irrelevant to the issue of whether the defendant should be sentenced to death.”
5 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence““[The petitioner] claims ‘inadequate preparation and presentation of mitigation evidence,’ because counsel should have hired a ‘mitigation specialist’ to gather mitigating evidence. However, he cites no authority that this is a requirement of effective assistance, and we hold that it is not.””
3 later decisions quote this exact passage“[w]here the same conduct by defendant can be construed to constitute two or more allied offenses of similar import, the indictment or information may contain counts for all such offenses, but the defendant may be convicted of only one.”
3 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.