Pannill v. Commonwealth’s Empirical Analysis
1946
Citation profile
42 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 42 later decisions — most recently July 2018 · most notably Coppola v. Commonwealth (1979), Lenz v. Commonwealth (2001)
42 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 · Bradshaw v. Commonwealth · Webb v. Commonwealth · Williams v. Commonwealth · McDaniel 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 42 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“For the killing to be willful, deliberate, and premeditated, it is necessary that it [should] have been done on purpose, and not by accident, or without design; that the accused must have reflected with a view to determine whether he would kill or not; and that he must have determined to kill as the result of that reflection before he does the act-that is to say, the killing must be a premeditated killing upon consideration. The design to kill need not have existed for any particular length of time; it may [have] been formed at the moment of the commission of the act.”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“‘“A deadly weapon is one which is likely to produce death or great bodily injury from the manner in which it is used, and v/hether a weapon is to be regarded as deadly often depends more on the manner in which it has been used than on its intrinsic character.”’”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“You may infer malice from the deliberate use of a deadly weapon unless, from all the evidence, you have a reasonable doubt as to whether malice existed. A “deadly weapon” is any object or instrument, not part of the human body, that is likely to cause death or great bodily injury because of the manner and under the circumstances in which it is used.”
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.