Pickens v. State’s Empirical Analysis
1896
Citation profile
60 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 60 later decisions — most recently September 1979 · most notably Wilson v. State (1942), Parsons v. State (1948)
60 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 Burton v. State · Ex parte Acree · Gilmore v. State · Prince v. State · Whitaker 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 60 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““The humane provision of the law is, that upon circumstantial evidence there should not be a conviction unless to a moral certainty, it excludes every other reasonable hypothesis than that of the guilt of the accused. No matter how strong may be the circumstances, if they can be reconciled with the theory that some other person may have done the act, then the guilt of the accused is not shown by that full measure of proof the law requires.””
1 later decision quote this exact passage““The test of the sufficiency of circumstantial evidence is, whether the circumstances as proved, produce a moral conviction to the exclusion of all reasonable doubt of the guilt of the accused — whether they are incapable of explanation upon any reasonable hypothesis consistent with his innocence. * * * ””
1 later decision quote this exact passage
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.