State v. Willits’s Empirical Analysis
1964
Citation profile
3 federal appellate · 197 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 202 later decisions — most recently October 2020 · most notably State v. Bolton (1995), State v. Murray (1995)
3 federal appellate · 197 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 Remington v. United States · United States v. Remington · Butane Corporation v. Kirby · Pfeiffer v. State · Reid v. Topper
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 202 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“If you find that the plaintiff, the State of Arizona, has destroyed, caused to be destroyed, or allowed to be destroyed any evidence whose contents or quality are in issue, you may infer that the true fact is against their interest.”
15 later decisions quote this exact passagee.g. State v. Boston · State v. Mitchell“If you find that the State has lost, destroyed, or failed to preserve evidence whose contents or quality are important to the issues in this case, then you should weigh the explanation, if any, given for the loss or unavailability of the evidence. If you find that any such explanation is inadequate, then you may draw an inference unfavorable to the State, which in itself may create a reasonable doubt as to the defendant’s guilt.”
11 later decisions quote this exact passage““[T]he rule permitting an inference [that the destroyed evidence would have proved facts against the state’s interest] is not based on the notion that the destruction is motivated by a desire to conceal the truth. Evidence, of course, may be innocently destroyed without a fraudulent intent simply through carelessness or negligence or, as the case might have appeared to the jury here, an unwillingness to make the necessary effort to preserve it. In any event, the State cannot be permitted the advantage of its own conduct in destroying evidence that might have substantiated the defendant’s claim regarding the missing evidence.””
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.