Brown v. State’s Empirical Analysis
1960
Citation profile
6 federal appellate · 2 district · 41 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 49 later decisions — most recently May 2012 · most notably 9 Md. App. 15 - Metz v. State (1970), Wilson v. State (1990)
6 federal appellate · 2 district · 41 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 Brown v. State · Vincent v. State · Newton v. State · McAffee v. United States · Davis 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 49 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““In every criminal case, evidence, to meet the test of legal sufficiency, must show directly, or support a rational inference of, the facts required to be proved; and the facts must be established, or the inference supported, beyond a reasonable doubt or to a moral certainty, or a reasonable doubt of an opposite fact must be created.””
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“[W]hen guilt is based solely upon circumstantial evidence, the circumstances, taken together, must be inconsistent with, or such as to exclude every reasonable hypothesis or theory of innocence. Vincent v. State, 220 Md. 232, 237 , 151 A.2d 898 . The Maryland rule is, we think, correctly stated in Vincent , but it is a far cry from the postulates contained in the requested prayer. The prayer would permit an inference of guilt upon circumstantial evidence only when the existence of the inculpatory facts is absolutely incompatible with the innocence of the accused and insusceptible of explanation upon any other hypothesis than that of his guilt. This would just about require proof of guilt in criminal cases to the degree of mathematical precision; a degree of proof that has never been deemed essential in Maryland, nor, insofar as it has come to our attention, elsewhere.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
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.