12 Va. App. 408 - Davis v. Commonwealth’s Empirical Analysis
1991
Citation profile
8 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 8 later decisions — most recently March 2013
8 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 Haskell v. Commonwealth · 6 Va. App. 351 - King v. Commonwealth · Heacock v. Commonwealth · Doane v. Commonwealth · 7 Va. App. 385 - Spain v. Commonwealth
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 8 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Here, we do not have a case where an habitual offender was driving carefully and an accidental death occurred. Instead, this case involves an habitual offender who accidentally killed a person while driving in a reckless manner in order to avoid being caught committing his felonious act of driving after being declared an habitual offender. The act of driving when forbidden to do so is not inherently dangerous. Rather, it is the act of driving while intoxicated or recklessly that is inherently dangerous. Consequently, a death caused by an habitual offender who is operating a vehicle is not necessarily necessitated by the commission of the felony of driving when declared an habitual offender.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“[I]f the accidental death, in the absence of imputed malice, would not have been a criminal homicide, then the statute does not elevate it to second. degree murder and impute culpability for the death to a cofelon [sic]. Moreover, ... a death which results not from actions of the felons nor from acts directly calculated to further the felony or necessitated by the felony, but from circumstances coincident to the felony, is not a death for which a felony-murder conviction will obtain. To punish as a murderer, every man who, while committing a heinous offense, causes death by pure misadventure, is a course which evidently adds nothing to the security of human life.”
1 later decision 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.