177 W. Va. 452 - State Ex Rel. Dodrill v. Scott’s Empirical Analysis
1987
Citation profile
1 federal appellate · 14 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 17 later decisions — most recently July 2025
1 federal appellate · 14 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 Estelle v. Gamble · Hutto v. Finney · 171 W. Va. 445 - Nelson v. West Virginia Public Employees Insurance Board · 406 F. Supp. 318 - Pugh v. Locke · Worthington v. Fauver
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 17 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[t]he language of the statute is mandatory, and requires the Commissioner of the Department of Corrections to accept for confinement all persons sentenced by courts of this State to state penal facilities. The jails of various counties, however, are not institutions within the West Virginia Department of Corrections. Thus W.Va.Code 62-13-5 [1977] prohibits the Commissioner of the Department of Corrections from lodging or forcing to be lodged in a county jail any person sentenced by a circuit court of this State to a state penal facility.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“[a]ll persons committed by courts of criminal ... jurisdiction for custody in penal, correctional or training institutions under the jurisdiction of the commissioner of corrections shall be committed to an appropriate institution, but the commissioner ... shall have the authority to and may order the transfer of any person to any appropriate institution within the department, (emphasis added).”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“although imprisonment in a pentientiary (sic) is under some penal statutes a matter of discretion, that discretion is vested in the judiciary rather than the executive. In the absence of an exercise of such discretion by the court, the statute creates a mandatory, non-discretionary duty to imprison those so convicted in the state.”
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.