Lambert v. State’s Empirical Analysis
1949
Citation profile
3 federal appellate · 34 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 40 later decisions — most recently August 2006 · most notably Merzbacher v. State (1997), Collins v. State (1990)
3 federal appellate · 34 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 Holt v. United States · Hopt v. People · Wilson v. United States · Commonwealth v. Kluska · Hopkins v. State
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 40 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“"After instructing the jury that the State must prove the commission of the crime beyond a reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty, the judge said: 'That doesn’t mean, however, that the State must prove those elements of a crime to an absolute or mathematical certainty. It means such evidence as you would act upon in a matter involving important affairs in your life or your business or with regard to your property. If the evidence is sufficient that you would act upon it in la very important matter in your own lives, then it is sufficient to convict in a criminal case.’ "It is a fundamental rule that the jury in a criminal case, before finding a verdict of guilty, must be satisfied of the guilt of the accused beyond a reasonable doubt. From time to time there has been controversy as to whether it is proper for a trial judge to attempt to instruct the jury as to the meaning of reasonable doubt. The term, as used in criminal law, may be defined broadly in the language of Chief Justice Shaw in Commonwealth v. Webster, 5 Cush (Mass.) 295, 320, 52 Am. Dec. 711 , 731, as 'that state of the case, which, after the entire comparison and consideration of all the evidence, leaves the minds of jurors in that condition that they cannot say they feel an abiding conviction, to a moral certainty, of the truth of the charge.’ In more recent years some of the courts have expressed the opinion that the English language is not adequate to give a specific definition of 'reasonable doubt’ that w”
7 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Wills v. State · Bruce v. State
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.