State v. Long’s Empirical Analysis
1986
Citation profile
1 district · 97 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 100 later decisions — most recently March 2026 · most notably State v. Henderson (2011), State v. Bishop (1988)
1 district · 97 state decisions — followed in 19 states
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 In the Matter of Samuel Winship · United States v. Wade · Neil v. Biggers · Snyder v. Commonwealth of Massachusetts · Peter J. Migliorini v. New York
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 100 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“(1) [T]he opportunity of the witness to view the actor during the event; (2) the witness’s degree of attention to the actor at the time of the event; (3) the witness’s capacity to observe the event, including his or her physical and mental acuity; (4) whether the witness’s identification was made spontaneously and remained consistent thereafter, or whether it was the product of suggestion; and (5) the nature of the event being observed and the likelihood that the witness would perceive, remember and relate it correctly. This last area includes such factors as whether the event was an ordinary one in the mind of the observer during the time it was observed, and whether the race of the actor was the same as the observer’s.”
15 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the dissente.g. State v. Rivera · State v. Mincy“is a central issue in a case and such an instruction is requested by the defense.”
6 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the dissente.g. State v. Clopten · State v. Bowdrey“[T]he circumstances [in this case] highlight the questionable wisdom of allowing the uncorroborated identification testimony of one eyewitness to serve as the linchpin of the prosecution’s case, at least in the absence of an instruction to the jury focusing its attention on the well-documented factors that affect the reliability of eyewitness identifications. The literature is replete with empirical studies documenting the unreliability of eyewitness identification. There is no significant division of opinion on the issue. The studies all lead inexorably to the conclusion that human perception is inexact and that human memory is both limited and fallible.”
5 later decisions quote this exact passagee.g. State v. Silva · State v. Tuttle
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.