State v. Vining’s Empirical Analysis
1994
Citation profile
9 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 9 later decisions — most recently February 2019
9 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 State v. Barry · State v. True · State v. Rich
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 9 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[T]he medical examiner’s opinion ... was not a product of her expertise. The medical examiner conceded that there was no physical evidence that [the victim’s] death had been caused by a human agent as opposed to an accidental fall. Her opinion was based solely on her discussions with the police investigators and therefore amounted to an assessment of the credibility and investigatory acumen of the police. The credibility of witnesses is the exclusive province of the jury. ... [T]he State argues that “[the medical examiner’s] opinion assisted the jury in determining whether [the victim’s] fatal injuries resulted from accidentally falling backwards off his chair onto the floor or from the severe force applied by another person.” That argument begs the issue. It is appropriate for the medical examiner to testify, as she did, that the damage to the skull shows that severe force was applied. It is another thing entirely, however, to testify that although the physical evidence was insufficient for her to distinguish whether [the victim] fell or was pushed, the police investigators have convinced her that [the victim’s] death was a homicide. That is not an expert medical opinion.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“amounted to an assessment of the credibility and investigatory acumen of the police,” and should have been a question for the jury, where the physical examination was inconclusive and the ultimate issue in the case was whether the victim was pushed down a staircase by the defendant or accidentally fell, and the medical examiner testified in her”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. State v. Commander
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.