170 W. Va. 224 - State v. Clark’s Empirical Analysis
1982
Citation profile
38 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 38 later decisions — most recently January 2014 · most notably 180 W. Va. 660 - Wimer v. Hinkle (1989), 171 W. Va. 428 - State v. Gravely (1982)
38 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 · Griffin v. California · Lockett v. Ohio · Davis v. Alaska · Anderson v. United States
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 38 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The general rule formulated for ascertaining whether a prosecutor's comment is an impermissible reference, direct or oblique, to the silence of the accused is whether the language used was manifestly intended to be, or was of such character that the jury would naturally and necessarily take it to be a reminder that the defendant did not testify.”
6 later decisions quote this exact passage“[T]he prosecution is free to stress the strength of the government's case and to argue the evidence and reasonable inferences therefrom, and the prosecutor is not constitutionally forbidden from telling the jury the fact that the evidence on any given point in the case stands uncontradicted. A prosecutor's statement that the evidence is uncontradicted does not "naturally and necessarily" mean the jury will take it as a comment on the defendant's failure to testify.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“no constitutional error was committed because the remark[s], when read in context, w[ere] not manifestly intended to be, nor w[ere] [they] of such a character that the jury would naturally and necessarily take it to be a comment on the failure of the accused to testify.”
2 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.