16 Va. App. 751 - Hamilton v. Commonwealth’s Empirical Analysis
1993
Citation profile
79 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 79 later decisions — most recently July 2019 · most notably 26 Va. App. 1 - Archer v. Commonwealth (1997), 27 Va. App. 505 - Marable v. Commonwealth (1998)
79 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 10 Va. App. 87 - Josephs v. Commonwealth · Drew v. Commonwealth · Bishop v. Commonwealth · Gillis v. Commonwealth · 4 Va. App. 317 - McGee 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 79 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“sufficient to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt so long as “all necessary circumstances proved ... [are] consistent with guilt and inconsistent with innocence and must exclude eveiy reasonable hypothesis of innocence.” The Commonwealth “need not affirmatively disprove all theories which might negate the conclusion that the defendant... [possessed the drugs], but the conviction will be sustained if the evidence excludes every reasonable hypothesis of innocence.””
1 later decision quote this exact passage“[i]t is axiomatic that `the Commonwealth need only exclude reasonable hypotheses that flow from the evidence, not those that spring from the imagination of the defendant,'”
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.