Commonwealth v. Ellis’s Empirical Analysis
1909
Citation profile
24 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 24 later decisions — most recently February 2005
24 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.
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 24 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The commonwealth sought to show by several witnesses that other members of the night riders told them -that the defendant Jake Ellis was a night rider. All of these declarations were merely hearsay, and were not admissible to show that the defendant belonged to the band of conspirators mentioned. The rule is elementary that, where a defendant is charged with being a conspirator, evidence must be first shown which, in the absence of contradictory evidence, would establish that he was a member of the band.... Here it was sought to be shown that the defendant belonged to the band of conspirators, by hearsay declarations of the conspirators themselves. This evidence, as said before, is clearly incompetent, and the trial judge correctly excluded it.”
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.