Ferrell v. Commonwealth’s Empirical Analysis
1941
Citation profile
20 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 20 later decisions — most recently February 2019
20 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 Sims v. Commonwealth · Evans v. Commonwealth · Commonwealth v. Best · State v. Boccadoro
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.
““Proof of motive does not establish guilt, nor want of it establish innocence; but while such proof is not a necessity, it is of great importance, and the absence of motive is a factor for the consideration of the jury, but only as bearing on the question whether or not the crime was committed by the accused.””
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.