State v. Whitfield’s Empirical Analysis
1874
Citation profile
8 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 12 later decisions (1 by the Supreme Court) — most recently April 1988
8 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.
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 12 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“; “It is contrary to the genius of our free institutions, that any admissions of a party should be heard as evidence against him unless made voluntarily. The common law looks with jealousy upon anything that has the semblance of torture, and declares that no confession of guilt shall be heard in evidence unless made voluntarily; for, if made under the influence of either hope or fear, there is no test of its truthfulness. . . . Such is the abhorrence of the common law in respect to extorting confessions, that it is a settled rule, no confession of one charged with crime shall be admitted in evidence against him when it appears that the confession was made by reason of hope or fear. . . . [W]e are satisfied, as a matter of legal inference, that the prisoner made the confession under the influence of hope or fear, or both feelings, excited by the conduct and language of the parties who had him in their power.””
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. State v. Pruitt
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.