Messenger v. State’s Empirical Analysis
1982
Citation profile
17 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 18 later decisions — most recently November 2002
17 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 Albrecht v. State · Cumbie v. State · Jones v. State · Murphy v. State · Ford 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 18 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“To say that two sexual assaults are similar because they are both acts of sadistic sexual deviations is not to point to a device that is so unusual and distinctive as to be like a signature. Almost any two sexual assaults could be characterized as sadistic acts, just as almost any two murders could be characterized as violent acts. This is nothing more than dressing in psychological garb the very thing that the law on evidence of extraneous offenses forbids: proof of the repeated commission of a class of offenses to demonstrate that the defendant is a criminal (or sexual deviant) generally.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passagee.g. Owens v. State · McGee v. State““Now, therefore, if you believe from the evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that in Harris County, Texas, on or about February 21,1980, the defendant did then and there with intent to arouse his sexual desire and by force or by threatening the imminent infliction of serious bodily injury or death to and without the consent of V-S_, a person not his spouse, have deviate sexual intercourse with her by placing his penis in her mouth, you will find the defendant guilty as charged.””
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Richards v. State
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.