McDonald v. State’s Empirical Analysis
1900
Citation profile
10 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 10 later decisions — most recently June 2000
10 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 10 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“We have often said, and we again repeat it, that if district attorneys would not attempt to charge defendants into the penitentiary by paring away, by instructions strained to the last point of legal tension, the rights of the defendants, they would not only secure as many convictions, but convictions not requiring to be set aside. We cannot too earnestly commend to district attorneys the wisdom of this course. Is it not far wiser to state the law in a few a very few instructions, stating the law clearly, and surely within the defendant's rights, than to attempt the solution of the problem how near the state may go, in its instructions, to fatal error, without erring? Surely it is, and this instruction is a striking example of the unwisdom of the latter course.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority“in the instruction, mean murder, and the effect of the instruction is to tell the jury that if”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
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.