157 W. Va. 640 - State v. Thomas’s Empirical Analysis
1974
Citation profile
9 federal appellate · 438 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 449 later decisions — most recently June 2019 · most notably Roger Lee McQueen v. Harold R. Swenson, Warden (1974), 160 W. Va. 234 - State v. Boyd (1977)
9 federal appellate · 438 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 Chapman v. State of California · Glasser v. United States · Johnson v. Zerbst · Coolidge v. New Hampshire · Powell v. State of Alabama Patterson
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 449 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“In the determination of a claim that an accused was prejudiced by ineffective assistance of counsel violative of Article III, Section 14 of the West Virginia Constitution and the Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution, courts should measure and compare the questioned counsel’s performance by whether he exhibited the normal and customary degree of skill possessed by attorneys who are reasonably knowledgeable of criminal law, except that proved counsel error which does not affect the outcome of the case, will be regarded as harmless error.”
34 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority““Where a counsel’s performance, attacked as ineffective, arises from occurrences involving strategy, tactics and arguable courses of action, his conduct will be deemed effectively assistive of his client’s interests, unless no reasonably qualified defense attorney would have so acted in the defense of an accused.””
20 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“The exceptions permitting evidence of collateral crimes and charges to be admissible against an accused are recognized as follows: the evidence is admissible if it tends to establish (1) motive; (2) intent; (3) the absence of mistake or accident; (4) a common scheme or plan embracing the commission of two or more crimes so related to each other that proof of one tends to establish the others; and (5) the identity of the person charged with the commission of the crime on trial.”
19 later decisions 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.