Clark v. United States’s Empirical Analysis
1980
Citation profile
28 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 29 later decisions — most recently January 2019 · most notably 105 Wash. 2d 632 - State v. Terrovona (1986), Nelson v. United States (1991)
28 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 Kotteakos v. United States · Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Corp. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. · Drew v. United States · Mutual Life Ins Co of New York v. Hillmon · Shepard 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 29 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Evidence as to prior altercations of a substantive and violent nature between appellant and the decedent is probative of the question of whether the appellant is an individual capable of committing such a violent act as [Graves'] murder.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the dissent“... could not be admitted without the risk that the jury would conclude that it tended to prove the acts of the defendant as well as of the declarant, and it is clear that the prosecution used the declaration to that end. There is no dispute as to the identity of the deceased or as to where she was at the time of her death. Since the evidence is overwhelming as to who the deceased was and where she was when she met her death, no legitimate purpose could be served by admitting her declarations of what she intended to do.... The only purpose that could be served by admitting such declarations would be to induce the belief that the defendant went out with the deceased, took her to the scene of the crime and there murdered her. Her declarations cannot be admitted for that purpose without setting aside the rule against hearsay.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the dissente.g. State v. Farmer“It will not do to say that the jury might accept the declarations for any light that they cast upon the existence of a vital urge, and reject them to the extent that they charged the death to someone else. Discrimination so subtle is a feat beyond the compass of ordinary minds. The reverberating clang of those accusatory words would drown all weaker sounds. It is for ordinary minds, and not for psychoanalysts, that our rules of evidence are framed. They have their source very often in considerations of administrative convenience, of practical expediency, and not in rules of logic. When the risk of confusion is so great as to upset the balance of advantage, the evidence goes out.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the dissent
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.