Ellison v. Commonwealth’s Empirical Analysis
1978
Citation profile
40 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 44 later decisions (2 by the Supreme Court) — most recently June 2008 · most notably Lilly v. Virginia (1999), State v. DeFreitas (1980)
40 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 Chambers v. Mississippi · Newberry v. Commonwealth · Hines v. Commonwealth
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 44 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[I]t is settled in Virginia that, while a declaration against penal interest is recognized as an exception to the hearsay rule, such a declaration made out of court by a dead or otherwise unavailable witness is admissible only upon a showing that the declaration is reliable. We make no attempt here to delineate the quality or quantity of evidence necessary to establish reliability; the question must be left to the sound discretion of the trial court, to be determined upon the facts and circumstances of each case. But, in any case, once it is established that a third-party confession has been made, the crucial issue is whether the content of the confession is trustworthy. And determination of this issue turns upon whether, in the words of Hines [v. Commonwealth, 136 Va. 728, 748 , 117 S.E. 843, 849 (1923)], the case is one where “there is anything substantial other than the bare confession to connect the declarant with the crime.””
4 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority““[W]e search the record for indicia of trustworthiness in the form of evidence from other witnesses that Brown confessed to them, extrinsic evidence connecting him with the Marks crimes, or a satisfactory combination of both.” 247 S.E.2d at 688 .”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Smith 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.