Earl v. State’s Empirical Analysis
1995
Citation profile
18 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 18 later decisions — most recently May 2022
18 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 California v. Curry · Bean v. State · McGuire v. State · Sipsas v. State · Keys v. State
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 18 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The killing of another person in self-defense is justified and not unlawful when the person who does the killing actually and reasonably believes: 1. That there is imminent danger that the assailant will either kill him or cause him great bodily injury; and 2. That it is absolutely necessary under the circumstances for him to use in self-defense force or means that might cause the death of the other person, for the purpose of avoiding death or great bodily injury to himself. A bare fear of death or great bodily injury is not sufficient to justify a killing. To justify taking the life of another in self-defense, the circumstances must be sufficient to excite the fears of a reasonable person placed in a similar situation. The person killing must act under the influence of those fears alone and not in revenge. An honest but unreasonable belief in the necessity for self-defense does not negate malice and does not reduce the offense from murder to manslaughter. The right of self-defense is not available to an original aggressor, that is a person who has sought a quarrel with the design to force a deadly issue and thus through his fraud, contrivance or fault, to create a real or apparent necessity for making a felonious assault. However, where a person, without voluntarily seeking, provoking, inviting, or willingly engaging in a difficulty of his own free will, is attacked by an assailant, he has the right to stand his ground and need not retreat when faced with the threat of deadl”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Runion v. State
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.