State v. Alston’s Empirical Analysis
1951
Citation profile
10 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 10 later decisions — most recently January 1994
10 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 State v. . Cash · State v. . McLeod · State v. Brackville
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 10 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““True, the verdicts here rest entirely upon circumstantial evidence, ‘but circumstantial evidence is not only a recognized and accepted instrumentality in the ascertainment of truth, but it is essential, and, when properly understood and applied, highly satisfactory in matters of the gravest moment.’ S. v. Brackville, 106 N.C. 701 , 11 S.E. 284 ; S. v. Cash, 219 N.C. 818 , 15 S.E. 2d 277 . ‘In some classes of cases the chain of evidence is said to be no stronger than the weakest link, but this is not always true, for sometimes facts, which seem weak by themselves, may be woven together like twigs in a bundle, or wires in a cable, and so a strong case may be constructed of facts which would be weak by themselves.’ Lockhart, North Carolina Handbook of Evidence, 2d Ed., Sec. 266, p. 316.””
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. State v. Hamilton
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.