Richards v. United States’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

11 federal appellate · 1 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 12 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. ““By the first of these requests a declaration was sought that, to find a defendant guilty, not only must each juror separately be convinced of his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, but he must also be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt of the existence of each fact necessary to be proved. This goes farther than the authorities relied on. [Oases cited.] We think the subdivision of the case and the essential elements of the offense into separate matter for1 the separate determination of each individual juror would have served to confuse, rather than assist in a just and lawful verdict. The unusual emphasis so given would have tended to destroy the interrelation between the important facts of the caso and the probative value which comes from the concurrent existence of a number of them, each assisting in the proof of the other — in other words, the rationale of circumstantial evidence.””

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Spear v. United States