Commonwealth v. Anderson’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

12 state decisions

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 12 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. ““Most generally the question involved here has been presented to the courts for their determination where the prosecuting power had endeavored to carve out of a single transaction separate offenses, and in such cases it has most universally been held that the plea under consideration would prevent the prosecutor from doing this, but we have been unable to find any case holding that where by two separate and distinct acts of the defendant, two separate and distinct offenses were committed, they could in ■any sense be called ‘the same offenses,’ as is required to successfully invoke the constitutional provision. The fact that these two distinct offenses were committed in close proximity as to time and while engaged in one affray, cannot be allowed to unify the two offenses when as a matter of fact they are not so. The time intervening between the commission of the two offenses can have no effect on the case whatever.””

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Wallace v. Commonwealth