State v. Gutierrez’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

2 federal appellate · 68 state decisions

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 72 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “The [s]tate has the burden of establishing that the constitutional error was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt.”

   2 later decisions quote this exact passage
   e.g. State v. Flores · 1 N.M. Ct. App. 535 - State v. Tollardo

2. “The zeal . . . of some prosecuting attorneys, tempts them to an insistence upon the admission of incompetent evidence, or getting before the jury some extraneous fact supposed to be helpful in securing a verdict of guilty. . . . When the error is exposed on appeal, it is met by the stereotyped argument that it is not apparent it in any wise influenced the minds of the jury. The reply the law makes to such suggestion is: that, after injecting it into the case to influence the jury, the prosecutor ought not to be heard to say, after he has secured a conviction, it was harmless. . . . [T]he presumption is to be indulged, in favor of the liberty of the citizen, that whatever the prosecutor, against the protest of the defendant, has laid before the jury, helped to make up the weight of the prosecution which resulted in the verdict of guilty.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. State v. Lopez

3. “even if conviction appears inevitable, there is a point at which an error becomes too great to condone as a matter of constitutional integrity and prosecutorial deterrence.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. 1 N.M. Ct. App. 535 - State v. Tollardo