Whittington v. Lynaugh’s Empirical Analysis
842 F.2d 818 · 1988
Citation profile
5 federal appellate · 2 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 19 later decisions — most recently October 2015
5 federal appellate · 2 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 42 U.S.C. § 1983 (Civil Rights Act of 1871 / Section 1983 (Ku Klux Klan Act))
Relies on Wolff v. McDonnell · Spears v. Ol McCotter
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 19 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“This is a classic case of a prison inmate making wholly unsupported allegations of a minor discrimination against him in his prison status, and then tying up the courts for three years, bedeviling the court with motion after motion still lacking in substance, ending in a pretrial hearing before the district court adjudging the case as frivolous and directing a sanction against the prisoner. We conclude therefore that the district court was correct in dismissing the case with prejudice as frivolous. The court also directed that the amount of $15.00 be withdrawn from appellant’s prison account to “reimburse the court ... for court costs incurred in this action,” as a sanction under Fed.R. Civ.P. 11. Since the entire claim of the appellant consists solely of “conclusory allegations” and at no time during the progress of the case and including the Spears hearing 7 did he advance the slightest factual support for his allegations, yet he bombarded the court with motions costing the court time and the taxpayers’ money which could well have been spent on more important things, we find the imposition of the sanction proper under the rule. ( 842 F.2d at 819-21 ). 8”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Humphrey v. Bowles
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.