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16 canonical passages across 13 cases, quoted by 938 opinions in total. These passages cluster together because the same opinions keep quoting them side by side: they state parts of one doctrine. The anchor passage is from Zant v. Stephens.
| # | Case | Flag | Canonical passage | Citers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Zant v. Stephens Anchor | green | “genuinely narrow the class of persons eligible for the death penalty and must reasonably justify the imposition of a more severe sentence on the defendant compared to others found guilty of murder.” | 148 |
| 2 | Gregg v. Georgia | green | “where discretion is afforded a sentencing body on a matter so grave as the determination of whether a human life should be taken or spared, that discretion must be suitably directed and limited so as to minimize the risk of wholly arbitrary and capricious action.” | 145 |
| 3 | Woodson v. North Carolina | green | “a corresponding difference in the need for reliability in the determination that death is the appropriate punishment in a specific case.” | 120 |
| 4 | Zant v. Stephens | green | “what is important at the selection stage is an individualized determination on the basis of the character of the individual and the circumstances of the crime.” | 110 |
| 5 | Furman v. Georgia | green | “meaningful basis for distinguishing the few cases in which the death penalty is imposed from the many cases in which it is not.” | 94 |
| 6 | Gardner v. Florida | green | “it is of vital importance to the defendant and to the community that any decision to impose the death sentence be, and appear to be, based on reason rather than caprice or emotion.” | 91 |
| 7 | California v. Ramos | green | “the qualitative difference of death from all other punishments requires a correspondingly greater degree of scrutiny of the capital sentencing determination.” | 57 |
| 8 | Godfrey v. Georgia | green | “if a state wishes to authorize capital punishment it has a constitutional responsibility to tailor and apply its law in a manner that avoids the arbitrary and capricious infliction of the death penalty.” | 41 |
| 9 | Tuilaepa v. California | green | “may not apply to every defendant convicted of a murder; it must apply only to a subclass of defendants convicted of murder” | 38 |
| 10 | Furman v. Georgia | green | “the eighth and fourteenth amendments cannot tolerate the infliction of a sentence of death under legal systems that permit this unique penalty to be so wantonly and so freakishly imposed.” | 32 |
| 11 | Furman v. Georgia | green | “cruel and unusual in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual.” | 31 |
| 12 | Arnold v. State | green | “substantial history of serious assaultive criminal convictions” | 17 |
| 13 | United States v. Regan | green | “that duplicate each other may impermissibly skew a jury in favor of imposing the death penalty.” | 4 |
| 14 | United States v. Chong | green | “particularized to the individual defendant.” | 4 |
| 15 | United States v. Davis | green | “desirable' for the jury to have 'as much information before it as possible' when deciding the penalty.” | 3 |
| 16 | United States v. Johnson | green | “sufficiently relevant to the inquiry of who should live and who should die” | 3 |
A red or yellow flag on a member means the underlying case has negative treatment: for those, check the case page before relying on the passage.