39 Ala. App. 638 - Sumeral v. State’s Empirical Analysis
1958
Citation profile
42 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 42 later decisions — most recently December 2013 · most notably 363 So. 2d 1020 - Thomas v. State (1978), 55 Ala. App. 88 - Bass v. State (1975)
42 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 Curley v. United States · Vick v. United States · Remmer v. United States · Ex parte Acree · Yoffe v. United States
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 42 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“" 'I remember so well that from time to time men who are not trained in the law have looked with suspicion upon circumstantial evidence and yet so many of the, of our every day acts and our dealings are based upon circumstantial evidence. We just assume that certain things are true because experience has shown that those things are true. We assume when we go to bed at night that the sun is going to rise the next morning because our practical experience has told us that we might expect that. Likewise if we have a heavy snow and we walk down through the woods and we see tracks in the snow, we know from the existence of those tracks that since it snowed a rabbit has passed that way and we would be perfectly willing to accept that demonstration of circumstances just as faithfully as we would the evidence of our own senses or eyes if we had seen the rabbit first run through the snow, and so circumstantial evidence is entitled to the same weight that direct evidence is entitled to provided *Page 568 that it points one way. ' — from oral charge by Hon. Seybourn H. Lynne in Bostwick v. United States, N.D.Ala. (on appeal at 5 Cir., 218 F.2d 790 ). (Italics added.) "However, circumstantial evidence is evidence only if it (along with the other evidence) is susceptible of a reasonable inference pointing unequivocally to the defendant's guilt. The law allows great latitude on admissibility in a case where the prosecution relies mainly on circumstantial evidence, e. g., Willis v. State, 37”
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.