State v. Best’s Empirical Analysis
1932
Citation profile
11 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 13 later decisions (2 by the Supreme Court) — most recently April 1995
11 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 Horn v. State · Lowery v. Howard · State v. Wilson · State v. Comery · Harris 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 13 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““Murder in the first degree. Whoever purposely and with premeditated malice or in the perpetration of, or to attempt to perpetrate any rape, arson, robbery, or burglary, or by administering poison or causing the same to be done, kills any human being, is guilty of murder in the first degree, and shall suffer death, but the jury may qualify their verdict by adding thereto, ‘without capital punishment’ and whenever the jury shall return a verdict qualified as aforesaid, the person convicted shall be sentenced to imprisonment, at hard labor, for life.””
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“A defendant has the right to have a jury not only to try the issue of guilt or innocence, but also to decide what the punishment shall be. The right to a trial on the issue of guilt or innocence may be waived by a plea of guilty, which leaves only the question of punishment to be decided by the jury.”
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.