Graham v. Collins’s Empirical Analysis
950 F.2d 1009 · 1992
Citation profile
44 federal appellate · 8 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 122 later decisions (2 by the Supreme Court) — most recently March 2010 · most notably Graham v. Collins (1993), Nichols v. Scott (1995)
44 federal appellate · 8 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 Gregg v. Georgia · Teague v. Lane · Furman v. Georgia · Lockett v. Ohio · Eddings v. Oklahoma
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.
“Typically, evidence of good character, or of transitory conditions such as youth or being under some particular emotional burden at the time, will tend to indicate that the crime in question is not truly representative of what the defendant’s normal behavior is or may become over time, and that the defendant may be rehabilitable so as not to be a continuing threat to society. The core of Jurek— which we cannot conclude has been abandoned — is that the mitigating force of this kind of evidence is adequately accounted for by the second special issue. But in Penry the Court was faced for the first time with a wholly different type of mitigating evidence. Not evidence of good character, but of bad character; not evidence of potential for rehabilitation, but of its absence; not evidence of a transitory condition, but of a permanent one; but nonetheless evidence which was strongly mitigating because these characteristics were due to the uniquely severe permanent handicaps with which the defendant was burdened through no fault of his own, mental retardation, organic brain damage and an abused childhood. There was no way this type of evidence could be given any mitigating force under the second special issue. To recognize that, as Pen-ry did, is not necessarily to deny the validity of Jurek as it applies to the more typical case.”
15 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“does not invalidate the Texas statutory scheme, and that Jurek 1 continues to apply, in instances where no major mitigating thrust of the evidence is substantially beyond the scope of all the special issues.”
9 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“(b) On conclusion of the presentation of the evidence, the court shall submit the following three issues to the jury: (1) whether the conduct of the defendant that caused the death of the deceased was committed deliberately and with the reasonable expectation that the death of the deceased or another would result; (2) whether there is a probability that the defendant would commit criminal acts of violence that would constitute a continuing threat to society; and (3) if raised by the evidence, whether the conduct of the defendant in killing the deceased was unreasonable in response to the provocation, if any, by the deceased.”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the dissente.g. Graham v. Collins · Jacobs v. Scott
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.