161 W. Va. 660 - State v. Belcher’s Empirical Analysis
1978
Citation profile
10 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 10 later decisions — most recently December 1994
10 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 Mullaney v. Wilbur · 159 W. Va. 738 - State v. Pendry · 135 W. Va. 106 - State v. Painter · 154 W. Va. 771 - State v. Collins · State v. Burdette
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 10 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““You, the jury, are instructed that to constitute a wilful, deliberate and premeditated killing, it is not necessary that the intention to kill should exist for any particular length of time prior to the actual killing; it is only necessary that such intention should have come into existence for the first time at the time of the killing or at any moment previously.””
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.