State v. O'BRIEN’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

13 federal appellate · 161 state decisions

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 179 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “Where a conviction of a greater offense has been overturned for insufficiency of the evidence, the reviewing court may enter a conviction for a lesser offense if the evidence was sufficient for the jury to find each of the elements and the jury was required to find those elements to enter the ill-fated conviction on the greater offense.”

   17 later decisions quote this exact passage
   e.g. United States v. Naylor · State v. Oris

2. “A challenge to the sufficiency of the evidence to support a finding of guilt is based in the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. No person may be deprived of liberty, ‘except upon evidence that is sufficient fairly to support a conclusion that every element of the crime has been established beyond a reasonable doubt.’ The constitutional sufficiency of the evidence is a question of law to be determined, in the first instance, by the trial court on proper motion by the defendant and again on appeal. When properly raised by the defendant, the question of sufficiency arises before the case is put to the jury; the challenge is to the ‘submissibility’ of the case. Therefore, any guilty verdict subsequently rendered by the jury is wholly irrelevant to the question of whether the case was sufficient to go to the jury at all. The Court’s review is limited to determining whether the evidence is sufficient to persuade any reasonable juror as to each of the elements of the crime, beyond a reasonable doubt. To ensure that the reviewing court does not engage in futile attempts to weigh the evidence or judge the witnesses’ credibility, courts employ ‘a legal conclusion that upon judicial review all of the evidence is to be considered in the light most favorable to the prosecution.’ Thus, evidence that supports a finding of guilt is taken as true and all logical inferences that support a finding of guilt and that may reasonably be drawn from the ”

   9 later decisions quote this exact passage
   e.g. State v. Robinson · State v. Mickle

3. “Proof that the defendant merely aided another with the purpose of facilitating an intentional killing cannot be sufficient to prove first degree murder and, therefore, Ervin clearly overruled Johns .... Additionally, to the extent that White has been read to require less than proof of the defendant’s own premeditation in every case, it too was overruled.”

   3 later decisions quote this exact passage
   e.g. Johns v. Bowersox · State v. Skillicorn