State v. Howell’s Empirical Analysis
1993
Citation profile
7 federal appellate · 102 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 122 later decisions (9 by the Supreme Court) — most recently July 2016 · most notably Coe v. Bell (1998), State v. Bland (1997)
7 federal appellate · 102 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 Chapman v. State of California · Delaware v. Van Arsdall · Davis v. Alaska · Gregg v. Georgia · Ohio v. Roberts
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 122 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“In order to guarantee the precision that individualized sentencing considerations demand and provide a principled explanation for our conclusion in each case, it is important, when conducting harmless error review, to completely examine the record for the presence of factors which potentially influence the sentence ultimately imposed. These include, but are not limited to, the number and strength of remaining valid aggravating circumstances, the prosecutor’s argument at sentencing, the evidence admitted to establish the invalid aggravator, and the nature, quality and strength of mitigating evidence.”
14 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the dissent“[I]f evidence that the defendant has committed a crime separate and distinct from the one on trial is relevant to some matter actually in issue in the case on trial, and if its probative value as evidence is not outweighed by its prejudicial effect upon the defendant, then such evidence may be properly admitted.”
4 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the dissente.g. State v. Bordis · State v. Wingard“[e]ven though the jury cannot weigh the invalid aggravating -factor against any mitigating factors, the jury can properly consider evidence of the circumstances of the crime and the character of the defendant in making an individualized determination of whether the death sentence is justified ... In that respect, an aggravating factor which duplicates the elements of the underlying crime has less relative tendency to prejudicially affect the sentence imposed than invalid aggravating factors which interject inadmissible evidence into the sentencing calculus, or which require the sentencing jury to draw additional conclusions from the guilt phase evidence.”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the dissente.g. State v. Hines · Sample 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.