Hart v. Commonwealth’s Empirical Analysis
1921
Citation profile
1 federal appellate · 30 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 34 later decisions (2 by the Supreme Court) — most recently July 2008 · most notably Harmelin v. Michigan (1991), Buck v. Bell (1927)
1 federal appellate · 30 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 Weems v. United States · Kemmler · George Collins v. James a Johnston · Peyroux v. Howard · McElvaine v. Brush
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 34 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““The punishment of death by electrocution (which is the present mode of inflicting the death penalty in Virginia), as is well settled, cannot in itself be regarded as a cruel or unusual mode of punishment.””
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority““It is a matter of history of the State, and of common knowledge among its people, that the crime of attempted rape is well nigh, if not altogether, as heinous as the consummated offense of rape. It is well known that public indignation is as much aroused by the one offense as the other, where the full accomplishment of the criminal purpose is thwarted only by some extraneous circumstance. And the almost universal repugnance which exists in the public mind to the making of the degree of the crime depend upon whether there has been an actual penetration or merely an attempted penetration, and the general aversion to the putting of the prosecutrix through the indecent and harrowing ordeal of having to testify in court upon such a subject, are well known. The likelihood of the resort to lynch law, unless there is a prompt conviction and a severe penalty imposed, and thus a resultant grave shock to the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth is well known to exist, almost if not quite equally, in the case of an attempted, as of a consummated rape. These are considerations which the legislature properly could, and which, therefore, we must conclude the legislature did take into account as an element of the measure of the punishment in enacting the statute under consideration and fully justified the severity of the extreme penalty allowed by the statute to be imposed, * *”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
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.