Abbott v. State’s Empirical Analysis
1947
Citation profile
30 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 30 later decisions — most recently April 2011 · most notably 5 Md. App. 450 - Williams v. State (1968), Chisley v. State (1953)
30 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 Sparf v. United States · Hallinger v. Davis · People v. Howard · Berger v. State · Bernard v. Warden of Maryland House of Correction
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 30 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““ ‘Murder’ is here recognized as a general denomination, including offenses differing from each other in their degrees of atrocity, but not in their nature or kind; no attempt is made to explain or modify its meaning or abridge its range. Its common law sense is left unimpaired ; the measure of punishment only is sought to be graduated according to the circumstances under which it was committed. “The mode of distinguishing its degrees is specially prescribed, by requiring the jury, if the person indicted for murder shall be tried, to ‘ascertain in their verdict whether it be murder in the first or second degree,’ or if the ‘person be convicted by confession, the court shall proceed by examination of witnesses to determine the degree of the crime and to give sentence accordingly.’ ””
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Chisley v. State
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.