17 Va. App. 44 - Belcher v. Commonwealth’s Empirical Analysis
1993
Citation profile
18 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 18 later decisions — most recently March 2015
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 13 Va. App. 540 - Robinson v. Commonwealth · 10 Va. App. 158 - Hudson 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 18 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““The guidelines are not binding on the trial judge; rather, the guidelines are merely a ‘tool’ to assist the judge in fixing an appropriate punishment. Hudson v. Commonwealth, 10 Va.App. 158, 161 , 390 S.E.2d 509, 511 (1990); see also Robinson v. Commonwealth, 13 Va.App. 540, 542 , 413 S.E.2d 661, 662 (1992). Consequently, application of the guidelines, either old or new, was voluntary. Moreover, our review of the sentencing determination here is limited to ascertaining whether the sentence falls within the range set by the legislature.””
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.