State v. Williams’s Empirical Analysis
1977
Citation profile
12 federal appellate · 911 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 947 later decisions (4 by the Supreme Court) — most recently December 2025 · most notably Engle v. Isaac (1982), State v. Long (1978)
12 federal appellate · 911 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 Chapman v. State of California · Mapp v. Ohio · Mullaney v. Wilbur · State v. Lytle · In re Disbarment of Gately
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 947 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[a]n appellate court need not consider an error which a party complaining of the trial court's judgment could have called, but did not call, to the trial court's attention at a time when such error could have been avoided or corrected by the trial court.”
60 later decisions quote this exact passage“[Reasonable doubt] is a doubt based on reason and common sense. Reasonable doubt is not mere possible doubt, because everything relating to human affairs or depending on moral evidence is open to some possible or imaginary doubt. `Proof beyond a reasonable doubt' is proof of such character that an ordinary person would be willing to rely and act upon it in the most important of his own affairs”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“* * * [t]he attempt to communicate by innuendo through the questioning of witnesses when the questioner has no evidence to support the innuendo is improper. * * *”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. State v. Skaggs
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.