State v. Middlebrooks’s Empirical Analysis
1992
Citation profile
13 federal appellate · 109 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 140 later decisions (2 by the Supreme Court) — most recently March 2023 · most notably State v. Murphy (2001), Tennessee v. Middlebrooks (1993)
13 federal appellate · 109 state decisions — followed in 12 states
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 18 U.S.C. § 3501
Relies on Miranda v. State of Arizona Vignera · Brady v. State of Maryland · Davis v. Alaska · Gregg v. Georgia · Furman v. Georgia
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 140 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“(1) The crime was committed against a person less than twelve (12) years of age and the defendant was eighteen (18) years of age or older; (2) The murder was especially heinous, atrocious or cruel in that it involved torture or depravity of mind; (3) The murder was committed for the purpose of avoiding, interfering with, or preventing a lawful arrest or prosecution of the defendant or another; and (4) The murder was committed while the defendant was engaged in committing the felony of rape, or was an accomplice in the commission of, or was attempting to commit, or was fleeing after committing or attempting to commit rape.”
9 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrencee.g. Irick v. State · State v. Stout“a principled way to distinguish the case in which the death penalty was imposed from the many cases in which it was not . . . and must differentiate a death penalty case in an objective, even-handed, and substantially rational way from the many murder cases in which the death penalty may not be imposed.”
7 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the dissente.g. State v. Van Tran · State v. Stout“[0]n the evening of Sunday, April 26, 1987, around 7:00 p.m., the victim, Kerrick Majors, a 14-year-old black male, was with four friends on Gallatin Road in East Nashville, Tennessee, when they saw a table with a “lot of stuff’ being set up across the street as a flea market by three homeless street persons: the defendant, Donald Middlebrooks (a 24-year-old white male); his wife, 17-year-old Tammy Middlebrooks; and their companion, 16-year-old Roger Brewington. The five boys ran across Gallatin Road and were looking at the flea market when Tammy Middlebrooks called out, “Hey, leave our stuff alone!” The boys started running. The defendant and Brewington chased them until they caught Majors. Brewington grabbed Majors in a “sleeper hold” around his neck and head. The defendant held his hand. When Majors said, “Hey man, you know me,” Brewington responded, “Shut up, you nigger.” Shannon Stewart and another of the boys, Tony Watson, saw the two men drag Majors toward the table and observed the defendant strike him in the face, knocking him to the ground. Frightened, the boys took off running. Later that evening, they reported these events to the victim’s mother, who called the police. The next afternoon, Kerrick Majors’ nude body was discovered lying face up in a dry creek bed under a foam mattress in a heavily wooded area behind a drugstore on Gallatin Road in the area where the defendant and Brewington had caught Majors. A bloodstained T-shirt was tied around his neck. A red ro”
2 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.