Rutherford v. United States’s Empirical Analysis
1908
Citation profile
5 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 5 later decisions — most recently October 1941
5 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 Hamilton v. State · Wantland v. State · Territory of New Mexico v. Lermo · People v. Walker · Gablick v. People
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 5 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““The danger in cases where circumstantial evidence is entirely relied upon for conviction is that jurors, being brought into court and impaneled for the purpose of determining the guilt or innocence of the defendant, and the court admitting the circumstances as evidence against the defendant, unless warned in some manner, might .be inclined to believe that absolute proof of the circumstances would be conclusive proof of the crime, and their attention would be exclusively directed to the evidence which established the incriminating circumstances, instead of weighing and judging whether or not the incriminating circumstances proven established the ultimate fact and proved beyond a reasonable doubt that defendant was the guilty party.””
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.