Sutton v. State’s Empirical Analysis
1938
Citation profile
24 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 24 later decisions — most recently November 1993
24 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 Neumann v. State · Shaw v. State · Watson v. State · Wiley v. State · Dalton 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 24 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The testimony merely that a witness purchased whisky with money furnished by an officer, and that the witness told the defendant that he `had just gotten over a drunk and was feeling mighty bad and had begged him [the defendant] to sell me [witness] whisky' is not sufficient to raise the defense of entrapment ... He committed a criminal act, and the evidence does not show that he did not exercise his own volition by so doing... Even if the statement of the witness to the defendant that he `had just gotten over a drunk and was feeling mighty bad' be considered as a temptation to sell the liquor, this would be but a repetition of the first plea ever interposed in Paradise: `The serpent beguiled me and I did eat.' That defense was overruled by the great Lawgiver, and whatever estimate we may form, or whatever judgment pass upon the character or conduct of the tempter, this plea has never since availed to shield crime or give indemnity to the culprit, and it is safe to say that under any code of civilized, not to say Christian, ethics, it never will.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“An officer may not induce persons who would not otherwise commit a crime to violate the law and then prosecute them for it. An officer should not lead a man into crime, thereby making him a criminal merely to punish him. `Entrapment is the seduction or improper inducement to commit a crime and not the testing by trap, trickiness, or deceit of one suspected.' [Cit.] The discovery of crime and the procurement of evidence by deception are not prohibited. A trap may be set. [Cits.]”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“A suspected person may be tested by being offered an opportunity to transgress in such a manner as is usual therein but may not be put under extraordinary temptations or inducements.”
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.