State v. MacFarlane’s Empirical Analysis
1982
Citation profile
3 federal appellate · 39 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 42 later decisions — most recently May 2016 · most notably State v. Couture (1984), State v. Vitale (1985)
3 federal appellate · 39 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 Beck v. Alabama · Enmund v. Florida · Keeble v. United States · Swansboro Country, Inc. v. Lumberman's Mortgage Co. · Garber v. United States
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.
“our law is crimes against a person such as a burglary are in common experience likely to involve danger to life in the event of resistance by the victim, or the attempt of the perpetrator to make good his escape and conceal his identity. It is a probable and natural and reasonable consequence of the attempt to commit such a crime that a human life will be destroyed. The commission of burglary is a crime that may cause the death of an innocent person as a consequence of this under our law.”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Flanders v. Meachum“In other words, the defendant, admittedly a willing and active participant in the underlying burglary, was accountable as a principal for the acts of the other participant in causing the death of the victim, assuming that the defendant did not actually kill [him].”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Flanders v. Meachum“[i]t is very likely that in the course of committing a burglary a burglar will encounter an occupant of the dwelling, who may resist, and, in furtherance of the burglary, death of the dweller may likely result”
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.