State v. Melendez’s Empirical Analysis
1981
Citation profile
20 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 20 later decisions — most recently July 2022
20 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 State v. Padilla · Smith v. State · State v. Heisler · State v. Scott · State v. Bazan
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 20 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“We can be certain that, under the evidence produced at trial, the jury did not believe [Melendez] acted in self-defense at the time he fired his gun. If they had believed his testimony that the occupants of the Tegada car had fired at him just before he returned the gunfire, they could not have reached the conclusion that he was not lawfully defending himself against what he reasonably believed was a design of others to commit great personal injury to himself....”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. State v. Melendez“Sufficient provocation can be any action, conduct or circumstances which arouse anger, rage, fear, sudden resentment, terror or other extreme emotions.”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. State v. Melendez
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.