Smith v. Lucas’s Empirical Analysis
9 F.3d 359 · 1993
Citation profile
10 federal appellate · 4 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 27 later decisions — most recently February 2011 · most notably Conkling v. Turner (1994), Kansa Reinsurance Company Ltd v. Congressional Mortgage Corporation of Texas United Postal Savings & Loan Assn (1994)
10 federal appellate · 4 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 Coleman v. Thompson · Teague v. Lane · Fay v. Noia · Maynard v. Cartwright · Clemons v. Mississippi
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 27 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“In the conditional writ cases, the federal court has determined that it has the authority to order immediate release of the prisoner as a result of the federal law violation; the court chooses, howev er, to delay the writ to allow the state to correct the problem as best it can. Although the federal court, in doing so, may certainly suggest a corrective procedure in broad terms, the real thrust of the order is to alert the state court to the constitutional problem and notify it that the infirmity must be remedied.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“be salvaged if the state appellate court eliminated the invalid aggravating factor and reweighed the remaining valid factors against the mitigating factors, or if it determined that the use of the invalid factor was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt.... Should the State elect to initiate further proceedings in the Mississippi Supreme Court, that court still has the option of reweighing or performing a harmless error analysis as those procedures have been defined in [the relevant cases].”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Smith v. Lucas“Smith responds ... that a federal court may use the habeas writ to prohibit the State permanently from executing a prisoner Smith understands Welch to allow a federal court indirectly to commute a death sentence into life imprisonment by prohib iting execution of the death sentence. Thus, he concludes, it is proper for a federal court to grant habeas relief to a state defendant sentenced to death in the form of a life sentence.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Smith v. Lucas
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.