Harding v. Davis’s Empirical Analysis
878 F.2d 1341 · 1989
Citation profile
26 federal appellate · 1 district · 7 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 53 later decisions — most recently January 2025 · most notably United States v. Swanson (1991), Scarpa v. Dubois (1994)
26 federal appellate · 1 district · 7 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 Strickland v. Washington · Faretta v. California · United States v. Cronic · Rose v. Lundy · Rose v. Clark
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 53 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The right to the effective assistance of counsel is thus the right of the accused to require the prosecution’s case to survive the crucible of meaningful adversarial testing. When a true adversarial criminal trial has been conducted—even if defense counsel may have made demonstrable errors—the kind of testing envisioned by the Sixth Amendment has occurred. But if the process loses its character as a confrontation between adversaries, the constitutional guarantee is violated.... “While a criminal trial is not a game in which the participants are expected to enter the ring with a near match in skills, neither is it a sacrifice of unarmed prisoners to gladiators.””
1 later decision quote this exact passage“"[The jury's] overriding responsibility is to stand between the accused and a potentially arbitrary or abusive Government that is in command of the criminal sanction. For this reason, a trial judge is prohibited from entering a judgment of conviction or directing the jury to come forward with such a verdict, regardless of how overwhelmingly the evidence may point in that direction."”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“[Counsel] was silent throughout virtually the entire trial, but most crucially, he remained silent as the judge directed a verdict against his criminal defendant client. We hold that his silence at the point the verdict was directed against his client was so likely to prejudice Harding that the cost of litigating its effect is unjustified and prejudice is presumed.”
1 later decision 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.