Harris v. Commonwealth’s Empirical Analysis
1922
Citation profile
24 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 25 later decisions — most recently December 2009 · most notably Williams v. Commonwealth (1987), McLane v. Commonwealth (1960)
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.
Relationships
Relies on Inman v. State · Combs v. State · Mullins v. Commonwealth · Ford v. State · McCoy 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 25 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Every person accused of crime, whether guilty or innocent, is entitled to have all his legal rights protected during his trial. And in a criminal case, the Commonwealth’s attorney, as the representative of the people, should guard against any violation of his rights in this respect. But if every improper remark of counsel were ground for reversal, comparatively few verdicts would stand, since the most eminent counsel are sometimes led into such inadvertencies. Appellate courts, therefore, hesitate to interfere by granting a new trial, except where the prosecuting attorney has so clearly departed from the line of legitimate procedure that any reasonable person will conclude that the jury were certainly prejudiced thereby.”
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.