State v. Smith’s Empirical Analysis
1992
Citation profile
270 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 272 later decisions — most recently December 2018 · most notably State v. Ortiz (1997), State v. Sanders (1994)
270 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 Jackson v. Virginia · Chapman v. State of California · In the Matter of Samuel Winship · Arizona v. Fulminante · Richardson v. Marsh
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 272 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[A] reviewing court is not called upon to decide whether it believes the witnesses or whether the conviction is contrary to the weight of the evidence.”
79 later decisions quote this exact passagee.g. State v. Egana · State v. Lewis“All persons concerned in the commission of a crime, whether present or absent, and whether they directly commit the act constituting the offense, aid and abet in its commission, or directly or indirectly counsel or procure another to commit the crime, are principals.”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage“To say that an error did not contribute to the verdict is, rather, to find that error unimportant in relation to everything else the jury considered on the issue in question, as revealed by the record.... Before reaching such a judgment, a court must take two quite distinct steps. First, it must ask what evidence the jury actually considered in reaching its verdict.... Once a court has made the first enquiry into the evidence considered by the jury, it must then weigh the probative force of that evidence as against the probative force of the presumption standing alone.... [I]t will not be enough that the jury considered evidence from which it could have come to the verdict without reliance on the presumption.... Since that enquiry cannot be a subjective one into the jurors' minds, a court must approach it by asking whether the force of the evidence presumably considered by the jury in accordance with the instructions is so overwhelming as to leave it beyond a reasonable doubt that the verdict resting on that evidence would have been the same in the absence of the presumption. It is only when the effect of the presumption is comparatively minimal to this degree that it can be said ... that the presumption did not contribute to the verdict rendered.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the concurrencee.g. State v. Tucker
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.