Dickens v. State’s Empirical Analysis
1973
Citation profile
75 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 75 later decisions — most recently June 2000 · most notably Willard v. State (1980), Swininger v. State (1976)
75 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. State · Burton v. State · Kinard v. United States · Commonwealth v. Flax · Brown 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 75 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““[A]ll that is required to reduce a homicide from murder to voluntary manslaughter is sufficient provocation to excite in the mind of the defendant such emotions as either anger, rage, sudden resentment, or terror as may be sufficient to obscure the reason of an ordinary man, and to prevent deliberation and premeditation, to exclude malice, and to render the defendant incapable of cool reflection.””
3 later decisions quote this exact passagee.g. Bryan v. State · Love v. State“"Passion, of course, takes many forms. The most important characteristic of a truly impassioned mind is its inability to function rationally. Webster's Third New International Dictionary (unabridged) defines `passion' as `the state of being subjected to or acted on by what is external or foreign to one's true nature; a state of desire or emotion that represents the influence of what is external and opposes thought and reason as the true activity of the human mind.' Rage and sudden resentment are the states of mind most often associated with manslaughter. However, fear is clearly a reason-obscuring state of mind and courts have held that fear, adequately provoked, will reduce murder to manslaughter. `[A]ll that is required to reduce a homicide from murder to voluntary manslaughter is sufficient provocation to excite in the mind of the defendant such emotions as either anger, rage, sudden resentment, or terror as may be sufficient to obscure the reason of an ordinary man, and to prevent deliberation and premeditation, to exclude malice, and to render the defendant incapable of cool reflection.' State v. Plummer (1940), 44 N.M. 614 , 107 P.2d 319 . See also: Com. v. Flax (1938), 331 Pa. 145 , 200 A. 632 ; Kinard v. United States (1938), 68 App.D.C. 250 , 96 F.2d 522 ."”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Sarwacinski v. State“We do believe that publicly made pretrial judicial statements regarding a pending case should arouse great suspicion in the minds of trial judges and should be closely seruti-nized before a change of venue from the county is denied.”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Barger 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.