Rachal v. State’s Empirical Analysis
1996
Citation profile
1 federal appellate · 133 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 135 later decisions — most recently July 2019 · most notably Santellan v. State (1997), King v. State (2000)
1 federal appellate · 133 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 Jackson v. Virginia · Witherspoon v. Illinois · Furman v. Georgia · Lockett v. Ohio · Wainwright v. Witt
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 135 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[T]hat the law permits jurors to find future dangerousness in some cases on the facts of the offense alone does not mean that all jurors must do so, or even consider doing so. A particular juror’s understanding of proof beyond a reasonable doubt may lead him to require more than the legal threshold of sufficient evidence to answer the second special issue affirmatively. There is nothing unlawful about that; in fact, quite the opposite. As the trial judge himself explained to Bradley early in his voir dire, an individual juror must determine what proof beyond a reasonable doubt means to him, for the law does not tell him[.] ... That an individual venireman would set his threshold higher than the minimum required to sustain a jury verdict does not indicate he has a bias or prejudice against the law.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrencee.g. Howard v. State · Murphy v. State“"potential jurors must be able to set aside their personal preferences and biases to consider as death eligible all those defined as death eligible by Section 19.03 of the Texas Penal Code and Article 37.071 of the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure. Potential jurors may believe what they want regarding the death penalty, including the quantum of evidence they will require to impose a death sentence. But, jurors may not substitute legal categories of death eligibility with their personal preferences and biases and thereby place themselves above the law."”
2 later decisions quote this exact passagee.g. Howard v. State · Johnson v. State“A Grand Jury's no-bill is merely a finding that the specific evidence brought before the particular Grand Jury did not convince them to formally charge the accused with the offense alleged.”
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.