Wilkerson v. Utah’s Empirical Analysis
99 U.S. 130 · 1878
Citation profile
107 federal appellate · 24 district · 129 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 402 later decisions (45 by the Supreme Court) — most recently September 2022 · most notably Estelle v. Gamble (1976), Gregg v. Georgia (1976)
107 federal appellate · 24 district · 129 state decisions — followed in 32 states
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 Hartung v. . the People
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 402 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[P]unishments of torture ... and all others in the same line of unnecessary cruelty, are forbidden by [the Eighth Amendment]”
15 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“public dissection in murder, and burning alive in treason committed by a female.”
4 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Glossip v. Gross · State v. C. G.“Cruel and unusual punishments are forbidden by the Constitution, but the authorities referred to are quite sufficient to show that the punishment of shooting as a mode of executing the death penalty for the crime of murder in the first degree is not included in that category within the meaning of the eighth amendment.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority
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.