State v. Stevenson’s Empirical Analysis
2004
Citation profile
443 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 443 later decisions — most recently August 2025 · most notably State v. Warholic (2006), State v. Fauci (2007)
443 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 Miranda v. State of Arizona Vignera · State v. Golding · State v. Williams · State v. Singh · State v. Reynolds
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 443 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“defense counsel's failure to object to the prosecutor's argument when it was made suggests that defense counsel did not believe that it was unfair in light of the record of the case at the time.”
5 later decisions quote this exact passage“[A] prosecutor may not express his [or her] own opinion, directly or indirectly, as to the credibility of the witnesses.... Such expressions of personal opinion are a form of unsworn and unchecked testimony, and are particularly difficult for the jury to ignore because of the prosecutor's special position.... However, [i]t is not improper for the prosecutor to comment upon the evidence presented at trial and to argue the inferences that the jurors might draw therefrom .... We must give the jury the credit of being able to differentiate between argument on the evidence and attempts to persuade them to draw inferences in the state's favor, on one hand, and improper unsworn testimony, with the suggestion of secret knowledge, on the other hand.... [W]e must look at the statement, including the use of the pronoun I, as a whole, in determining whether it was an expression of the state's attorney's personal opinion regarding the credibility of witnesses.”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage“[T]he prosecutor's choice of words, at best, was inartful, but ... when viewed in the context of his entire closing argument ... even if ... improper, that impropriety did not deprive the defendant of a fair trial.”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage
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.