picked a handful of violets in my name

In class yesterday, one of my professors informed us that in English, the default case is accusative, so in situation where case is not decided by the verbs, etc, accusative should be used. (His example was if someone says "Who wants ice cream?" the natural response is "Me" not "I".) He also claimed that places where case should be default but nominative is used are results of learned hyper-correction, influenced in part by a generation that knew Latin (where NOM is the the default case). I wasn't paying close enough attention to evaluate any of this, though, and he's not really a syntactician, only pretending to be one.

Which is a roundabout way of saying I prefer the first.