Coffman v. Commonwealth’s Empirical Analysis
1948
Citation profile
9 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 9 later decisions — most recently February 2012
9 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 Williamson v. Commonwealth · Raven Red Ash Coal Corp. v. Absher · Commonwealth v. Smith · Tonnahill v. State
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 9 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““[M]ore than one intended consequence is included. If only the intent to cause an abortion, in the sense of expulsion of the fetus, and the causing of such abortion, were meant to be covered, the words ‘intent to destroy her unborn child,’ and ‘thereby destroy such child’, would be useless. It is not to be presumed that those words were used for no purpose and mean nothing in the statute.””
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority“any means” with intent to destroy an unborn child or to produce an abortion, and held:”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. State v. Shelton
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.