Commonwealth v. Franklin’s Empirical Analysis
1952
Citation profile
3 federal appellate · 26 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 29 later decisions — most recently December 1992 · most notably Wm. Penn Parking Garage, Inc. v. City of Pittsburgh (1975), Archbishop O'Hara's Appeal (1957)
3 federal appellate · 26 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 Connally v. General Construction Co. · Wolf v. People of the State of Colorado · Lanzetta v. State New Jersey · Lovell v. City of Griffin · Stromberg v. People of State of California
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 29 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“‘To the jury belongs the power to err, not alone in gullibility but also deliberately. A most important portion of the administration of our system of criminal justice is the fact that the jury in subtle ways may temper the rigidity of our criminal code in the application of the letter of the law to particular cases and may perhaps thereby mitigate the rigors of the law.’ Commonwealth v. Franklin, 172 Pa.Super. 152, 193 , 92 A.2d 272, 292 (1952).” Stegmaier, 247 Pa.Super. at 162 , 371 A.2d at 1377, 1378 .”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“That in every county ... shall be assigned for the keeping of the peace, one lord, and with him three or four of the most worthy in the county, with some learned in the law, [with the power] to take and arrest all those that they may find by indictment, or by suspicion, and to put them in prison; ... and to take of all them that be not of good fame, where they shall be found, sufficient surety and mainprise of their good behaviour towards the King and his people, and the other duly to punish, to the intent that the people be not by such rioters or rebels troubled nor endamaged, nor the peace blemished, nor merchants nor other passing by the highways of the realm disturbed, nor put in the peril which may happen of such offenders.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. State v. Weller“It would be hard to hold that, in advance of judicial utterance upon the subject, they were bound to understand the challenged provision according to the language later used by the court. . . . The challenged provision condemns no act or omission; the terms it employs to indicate what it purports to denounce are so vague, indefinite and uncertain that it must be condemned as repugnant to the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”
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.