McCracken v. State’s Empirical Analysis
1996
Citation profile
14 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 14 later decisions — most recently June 2022
14 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 Miranda v. State of Arizona Vignera · Rhode Island v. Innis · Doyle v. Ohio · Petersen v. Mutual Life Insuarance Co. of New York · Hunter 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 14 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[W]hen evidence of the victim’s character for violence is introduced ... to prove the reasonableness of the defendant’s fear of imminent deadly attack[], it is not being used as “character evidence” in the usual sense. Although evidence of a victim’s reputation for violence or a victim’s past acts of violence may, indeed, tend to show that the victim had a violent character, the primary relevance of the evidence is not to prove the victim’s violent character, nor to prove that the victim acted in conformity with a violent character at the time of the incident in question. Rather, the primary relevance of this evidence is to prove the defendant’s state of mind when he or she used deadly force against the victim — in particular, the reasonableness of the defendant’s fear that the victim was about to attack with deadly force. [[Image here]] As Wigmore explains [J.H. Wigmore, Evidence in Trials at Common Law (Chadbourne rev’n 1979), § 248], “the real purpose [of this evidence] is merely to show such conduct as would, naturally excite apprehension [on the part of the defendant], whether it objectively indicates a fixed trait of [the victim’s] character or not.” [Vol. 2,] p. 71.”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Allen v. State“When a homicide defendant asserts that he or she acted in self-defense, the law does not require the defendant to prove that he or she actually faced imminent deadly attack. Even if the defendant’s fear turns out to have been mistaken, the defense still may be established if the defendant proves that, under the circumstances, he or she reasonably feared imminent deadly attack at the hand of the victim.”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Lamont v. State“it may tend to demonstrate that the defendant's fear of imminent deadly force at the victim's hand was reasonable.”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Johnson v. State
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.