Rainey v. State’s Empirical Analysis
1992
Citation profile
69 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 69 later decisions — most recently October 2025 · most notably Matthew Armstrong v. State of Arkansas (2020), McCoy v. State (2002)
69 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 Caton v. State · Robinson v. State · Taylor v. State · Sanders v. State · Clardy 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 69 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“(a) a person commits manslaughter if: (1) He causes the death of another person under circumstances that would be murder, except that he causes the death under the influence of extreme emotional disturbance for which there is a reasonable excuse. The reasonableness of the excuse shall be determined from the viewpoint of a person in the defendant’s situation under the circumstances, as he believes them to be.”
6 later decisions quote this exact passage“may consist of anger or sudden resentment, or of fear or terror; but the passion springing from any of these causes will not alone reduce the grade of the homicide. There must also be a provocation which induced the passion, and which the law deems adequate to make the passion irresistible. An assault with violence upon another who acts under the influence thereof may be sufficient to arouse such passion.”
4 later decisions quote this exact passagee.g. Pollard v. State · Spann v. State“A remaining issue is whether the Trial Court’s failure to instruct on manslaughter was prejudicial. As a general rule, when the jury convicts a defendant of first degree murder, even though an instruction on the lesser included offense of second degree murder has been given, any error resulting from the failure to instruct on the still lesser included offense of manslaughter is cured. See, e.g., Easter v. State, 306 Ark. 615 , 816 S.W.2d 602 (1991); Taylor v. State, 303 Ark. 586 , 799 S.W.2d 519 (1990).This is commonly referred to as “the skip rule.”When the jury convicts of a greater offense and “skips” a lesser included offense, there can be no error in failing to instruct on other even lesser included offenses. Rainey argues the skip rule should only apply when the lesser included offense for which an instruction was denied refers to a mental state one step less culpable than the instructed offenses. In other words, the skip rule only applies when the instructed and non-instructed offenses are described in degrees of culpability, and the lesser are indeed “included” in those for which the punishment is greater. No doubt we have applied the skip rule when a trial court failed to instruct the jury on manslaughter, and the jury returned a verdict of murder in the first degree, thereby skipping the lesser included offense of murder in the second degree. We have done so without reference to the type of manslaughter instruction involved or the mental state necessary for the offe”
2 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.