Wilson v. Commonwealth’s Empirical Analysis
1932
Citation profile
1 federal appellate · 18 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 20 later decisions — most recently February 1996
1 federal appellate · 18 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 Coleman v. State · Butts v. Commonwealth · State v. Chisnell · Kibler v. Commonwealth · Spencer 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 20 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“When of opinion that the wilful misconduct of the representative of the commonwealth has prejudiced the jury against him, his remedy is to immediately move the court to discharge the jury and grant him a new trial. Otherwise, it “would put it in the power of a defendant to compel a second trial, at his election, whenever a prosecutor at any stage, by inadvertence or otherwise, violated the spirit of the statute under consideration; and this, too, notwithstanding the trial court may have done its utmost to rectify the mistake, and may have made no ruling or decision in that connection adverse to the defendant or to which he took any exception. . . . Misconduct on the part of the prosecutor is not different from misconduct of a juror or other person connected with trial. It is a settled rule that a person having knowledge of the misconduct or incompetency of a juror, or other matter not affecting the jurisdiction, which would vitiate the trial, who proceeds to a conclusion without objection, will not afterwards be heard to object that the trial was vitiated 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.