Brown v. State’s Empirical Analysis
1995
Citation profile
137 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 137 later decisions — most recently October 2018 · most notably Laster v. State (2009), Poindexter v. State (2005)
137 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 Jackson v. Virginia · Holland v. United States · Geesa v. State · Matson v. State · Carlsen v. State
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 137 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Because, under our law, an accused must not only have exercised actual care, control, or custody of the substance, but must also have been conscious of his connection with it and have known what it was, evidence which affirmatively links him to it suffices for proof that he possessed it knowingly. Under our precedents, it does not really matter whether this evidence is direct or circumstantial. In either case it must establish, to the requisite level of confidence, that the accused’s connection with the drug was more than just fortuitous. This is the whole of the so-called “affirmative links” rule.”
7 later decisions quote this exact passage“... each defendant must still be affirmatively linked with the drugs he allegedly possessed, but this link need no longer be so strong it excludes every other outstanding reasonable hypothesis except the defendant's guilt.”
3 later decisions quote this exact passagee.g. Davis v. State · Dade v. State“[T]he so-called “affirmative links” doctrine never actually acquired any of the characteristics typical of a legal rule. It has no peculiar methodology associated with its use. It does not assign the burden of persuasion in any particular way, prescribe a certain level of confidence, or map out a unique approach which distinguishes it from other rules of law for determining evidentiary sufficiency. It is still, just as it always was, only a shorthand expression of what must be proven to establish that a person possessed some kind of drug “knowingly or intentionally.””
2 later decisions quote this exact passage
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.