Thompson v. State’s Empirical Analysis
1997
Citation profile
4 federal appellate · 15 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 20 later decisions (1 by the Supreme Court) — most recently February 2018
4 federal appellate · 15 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 · Griffin v. California · Oregon v. Elstad · Estelle v. Smith · Mills v. Maryland
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 20 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Attorney Richardson admitted, “I frankly did not know that ... the [sjtate could use information given by the defendant to a psychiatrist.” Attorney Parsons testified that their strategy was to emphasize positive attributes of the petitioner and show the jury that he could lead a productive life in prison. Dr. Copple’s testimony played a key role in this strategy. Although both trial attorneys apparently were surprised by the fact that the state could use the information acquired by MTMHI, Attorney Parsons did acknowledge that he knew that positive testimony by Dr. Copple would open the door for the state to present negative information. Again, the petitioner has failed to establish any prejudice by whatever deficiency there may have been in the performance of counsel. The evidence does not preponderate against the finding that the sentence would have been dif ferent if the attorneys had known the information collected by MTMHI would have been admissible. In our view, trial counsel had little choice other than to call Dr. Copple in an effort to establish adequate mitigating circumstances. Even if there had been proof that trial counsel should have pursued a different strategy, there has been no indication that another strategy would have been more effective. Because the jury found three aggravators, we cannot conclude that the outcome would have been any different if the jury had not heard the evidence concerning the testing by MTMHI. If any witness testified to the petitione”
2 later decisions quote this exact passagee.g. Thompson v. Bell · Thompson v. Bell“[t]he petitioner has failed to establish that the head injuries had any effect upon his mental stability at the time of the murder. Further, he has failed to establish that any type of psychological impairment in general may have existed which would have been mitigating evidence.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passagee.g. Thompson v. Bell · Thompson v. Bell“[t]here were certain witnesses that we had to face a problem of them bringing up the problems that he had in the Navy.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passagee.g. Thompson v. Bell · Thompson v. Bell
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.