153 Pa. Super. 582 - Commonwealth v. Mitchell’s Empirical Analysis
1943
Citation profile
6 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 8 later decisions — most recently November 1972
6 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 Morse v. United States · In Re Begerow · United States v. Cadarr · Clark v. Commonwealth · Commonwealth v. Zec
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.
““The plain literal meaning of the act is clear — ‘he shall be discharged from imprisonment’' — nothing more than that. Nor does the constitutional provision in Article I, Section 9, of our Constitution of 1874, which provides that ‘in all criminal prosecutions the accused hath a right to ... a speedy public trial by an impartial jury of the vicinage’ warrant the granting of anything beyond a discharge from imprisonment. Our interpretation of the constitution and our statute permits a prisoner to be discharged from unlawful imprisonment, but does not permit the guilty to escape prosecution because of a fortuitous circumstance which delays the trial. If we accept the construction as contended for by the appellee, it -would mean that a defendant out on bail after two terms must stand trial, while a defendant imprisoned for two terms without trial goes free. Such a result was never intended by the framers of the act”.”
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.