State v. McGhee’s Empirical Analysis
1979
Citation profile
38 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 38 later decisions — most recently February 2007 · most notably State v. Pham (1984), State v. Peoples (1980)
38 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 Jackson v. Virginia · Penn Central Transportation Co. v. New York City · Martin Theatres of Texas, Inc. v. Bullock · State v. Childers · State v. Voiles
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 38 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““The rule is that a party who offers an object into evidence must show that it is reasonably certain that there have been no material alterations of the object since it was first taken into custody. It is not necessary, however, that the object offered into evidence should have been kept continuously under lock-and-key or continuously sealed up. The preliminary proof of the identity of the object and that the same has not been improperly tampered with, is first to be determined by the trial court. It is not necessary that all possibility of its being tampered with should be excluded. . . . [This] test for chain of custody has been characterized as ‘reasonable certainty that no material alterations of the objects occurred.’ “. . . Any deficiency in the chain of custody should go to the weight rather than to the admissibility of the evidence.””
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. State v. Bright
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.