Watson v. State’s Empirical Analysis
2004
Citation profile
50 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 50 later decisions — most recently January 2020 · most notably Dunn v. State (2007), Nelson v. State (2006)
50 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 United States v. Marion · Harmon v. State · Coggin v. State · Walley v. State · Barrett 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 50 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“A criminal defendant’s intent or state of mind is seldom capable of proof by direct evidence and must usually be inferred from the circumstances of the crime. Because intent cannot be proven by direct evidence, the jurors are allowed to draw upon their common knowledge and experience to infer it from the circumstances. Moreover, because of the obvious difficulty in ascertaining a defendant’s intent or state of mind, a presumption exists that a person intends the natural and probable consequences of his or her acts.”
1 later decision 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.