Ladson v. State’s Empirical Analysis
1981
Citation profile
58 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 60 later decisions — most recently April 2025 · most notably Williams v. State (1983), Harper v. State (1982)
58 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 Santoni v. United States · Timberlake v. State · Birt v. State · Patterson v. State · Alderman 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 60 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Defendant argues that he was harmed by the jury’s “confusion” resulting from the trial court’s failure to charge the jury that Starling was an accomplice. However,. . . this would have been tantamount to a charge that the defendant, as a matter of law, was a participant in the crime. . . . “To be accomplices of each other, both the defendant and the State’s witness must have been involved in the criminal enterprise. One cannot be the ‘accomplice’ of an innocent man. It therefore constitutes an expression of opinion by the court as to the guilt of the accused to instruct the jury that a witness who testified as to the defendant’s guilt and admitted his participation in the crime would be an accomplice of the accused.””
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Johnson 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.