Spohn v. State’s Empirical Analysis
1992
Citation profile
23 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 23 later decisions — most recently November 2017
23 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 Alford v. State · White v. State · Mauppin v. State · Sweatt v. State · Cox 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 23 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“It is true as a general rule that proof of other crimes or bad acts is never admitted when its only relevancy is to show that the accused is a person of bad character. Ark. R. Evid. 404(b); see also Sweatt v. State, 251 Ark. 650 , 473 S.W.2d 913 (1971); Alford v, State, 223 Ark. 330 , 266 S.W.2d 804 (1954). However, in McCormack on Evidence, the following statement of the law is made relative to character testimony: Ordinarily, if the defendant chooses to inject his character into the trial in this sense, he does so by producing witnesses who testify to his good character. By relating a personal history supportive of good character, however, the defendant -may achieve the same result. Whatever the method, once the defendant gives evidence of pertinent character traits to show that he is not guilty, his claim of possession of these traits-but only these traits-is open to rebuttal by cross-examination or direct testimony of prosecution witnesses.”
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.