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112 Nev. 499

Whitney v. State

Nevada Supreme Court

Decided April 30, 1996

Nevada Supreme Court · decided 1996-04-30

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1996-04-30

How this case has been cited

Cited by 12 later decisions — most recently December 2025

12 state decisions

401996200020102020decided

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.

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Steffen, C. J.,

¶1dissenting:

¶2The majority sees this case as that of a prosecutor seeking to shift the burden of proof to the defendant below. I see it as a case of fair comment by a prosecutor after defense counsel attempted to demonstrate that the State failed to properly investigate the case by not calling other witnesses who attended Melinda Bohall’s party. Indeed, the prosecutor suggested that: “the reason that those witnesses weren’t here is because they couldn’t add anything to the case. If there were 50 witnesses that didn’t see Mr. — the defendant there, why would they be a witness? Why would they be asked to testify?” It appears to me that the prosecutor is fairly responding to defense counsel’s comments, indicating that the reason the State did not call other witnesses is because they had nothing to contribute to the evidence. In any event, I see this case as overturning a jury verdict by “making a mountain out of a molehill.” I therefore dissent.

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